Pinkobak

both nodes some rep capt 7 25

PINKOPROF725

old idea, new tag 819= academic

SEE PINKO prof

SEE FOUNDATIONAL MYTHS

see acad suppress

MERRI OK

see campus free speech BS

// liberal media BS

see rufo CRT

see stanley Kurtz

see hackademics

see koch-ademia

see moral panic for kids bird bird vaxx

bak pinko9 22 endit1

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Trump divide among American conservative professors - PMC

Theory Soc

. 2023 May 27:1–31. Online ahead of print. doi: 10.1007/s11186-023-09517-4

Trump divide among American conservative professors

David L Swartz ^1,✉

• Author information
• Article notes

PMCID: PMC10224651 PMID: 37362148

Abstract

There has been an outpouring of research on right-wing populist conservatism since the advent of the Trump presidency and right-wing movements in Europe. Yet, little research has been devoted to divisions among conservatives themselves, especially among conservative academics. Although Trump has maintained remarkable unity within the Republican Party for electoral reasons, he has fostered sharp divisions among conservative intellectuals and academicians. This article compares 102 politically conservative professors who are Trumpists and 80 conservative professors who are anti-Trumpists.

All 182 function as public intellectuals who advocate their views in print and digital media. Drawing on recent research in the sociology of intellectuals and particularly Pierre Bourdieu’s analytical field perspective, this article proposes a fielding political identities and practices framework to show how these two groups of professors (Trumpists and anti-Trumpists) differ in where they teach, their intellectual orientations, their scholarly productivity, where they network with think tanks, scholarly professional associations, and government agencies, and their stances on key issues surrounding the Trump presidency.

The academic Trumpists embrace the right-wing populist wave mobilized by Trump and the conservative academic critics resist this move. This polarization of views between these two groups of conservative professors is enduring and rooted in two distinct social networks that connect positions in the academic field to affiliations with think tanks, government agencies, and professional associations in the field of power that reinforce their respective political identities. This research contributes to political sociology, the sociology of intellectuals, and the sociology of conservative politics in American higher education.

Keywords: Bourdieu, Conservatism, Intellectuals, Populism, Professors, Trumpism

In October 2016 there appeared an online list Scholars & Writers for America: Statement of Unity of 177 supporters for the presidential candidate Donald Trump.1 The Statement of Unity offered five topical reasons for supporting Trump’s candidacy: constitutional governance, corruption in government, economic stimulus, religious liberty, and education. Sixty-nine of the signers were professors who held academic teaching/research positions in colleges and universities. Yet, Trump was hardly a candidate that one would imagine igniting much support in the academy.

Indeed, there was very little.2 Donald Trump was not elected president in 2018 by strong support from students, faculty, and staff on America's college and university campuses. Nor did they offer electoral support during his failed attempt to be reelected in 2020. Indeed, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden were by far the more popular presidential contenders in 2020 among students and professors. Trump stoked the fires of right-wing populism by stressing American-first nationalism and anti-immigration. He attacked identity politics popular on many American colleges and campuses. He made an about-face on the right to abortion supported by many students and faculty.

Had not Trump criticized science and objective knowledge by proposing alternative facts? Was he not critical of American higher education? Yet, a small number of professors did publicly support Trump in both elections. Who were these professors? How could individuals who had spent their lives separating fact from fiction support such a political figure? Why would an academic support an individual and political movement that challenged the very basis of his/her intellectual career and institutional setting? Was not academic Trumpist an oxymoron?

Not all politically conservative academics supported Trump. Indeed, not only liberal professors but also some conservative faculty strongly opposed both Trump’s candidacy and his presidency. Who were these conservative anti-Trumpists?

:{:{Although Trump maintained remarkable unity within the Republican Party for electoral reasons, he created sharp divisions among conservative intellectuals and academicians. The Trump era increased the political polarization not only in American society but also within the academy. Yet little research attention has thus far been devoted to the divisiveness of Trumpism within the American professorate.3}:

This article addresses this gap in the research literature by looking at the impact of Trumpism on conservative faculty. It compares 102 professors who publicly supported Trump to 80 conservative professors who opposed Trump. All 182 functioned as public intellectuals who advocated their views in print and especially in the digital media. }:

Who were these academic Trumpists and their conservative academic critics? Comparisons look at their respective positions (school prestige, intellectual orientation, and scholarly productivity) in the field of American higher education. What were the principal rationales used by the academic Trumpists in support of Trump and the critical objections used by those who opposed him? In addition, the article examines the network affiliations to major think tanks, government agencies, and professional scholarly associations where these professors try to influence the public agenda with their views.

Particularly important has been the development of intellectual outlets in conservative think tanks that provide a venue of solidarity for conservative professors beyond the purview of liberal campus politics. Finally, the article looks at what stances these two groups took relative to four of the most important challenges of the Trump era: Covid-19, the two impeachments, the November 2020 election lost, and the January 6 mob assault on the US Capitol. Did these challenges lead any of these professors to change their minds? Why or why not? A concluding discussion reviews the key findings and explores some implications.

A field analytical perspective

...

To situate these two groups of academic conservatives in terms of the field of American higher education, this article looks at the type of school and its national standing as measured by the widely used U.S. News & World Report (USNWR) rankings for 2022.15 In Bourdieusian terms, institutional ranking can be considered a measure of symbolic capital.16 The 182 professors teach in 112 different institutions of higher learning. For the most part, they are in major private and public research universities. The 80 anti-Trumpists teach across 53 different schools whereas the 102 Trumpists teach across 74 different schools.

In terms of locations within the field of American higher education, these schools are situated closer to the prestigious center than to the periphery. Thirty-three percent (60 of 182) of these professors teach in the 50 most prestigious universities. Only 14 percent of the 182 individuals teach in liberal arts colleges. Only two teach in two-year public community colleges, which are at the less prestigious margins of the American higher education system. This is clearly a culturally elite group of professors.

Nevertheless, there are some significant differences between the two groups. The anti-Trumpists were more likely to obtain their graduate degrees from higher ranked institutions: sixty-six percent of the anti-Trumpists obtained their highest degrees from one of the top 50 schools in the United States where fifty-three percent of the Trumpists did – a difference of thirteen percentage points. The Trumpists, however, were more concentrated around just a few schools.

Most striking is that 13 of the 102 pro-Trump professors obtained their highest graduate degrees from just one institution: Claremont Graduate University. The number of graduates from Claremont and the number of current positions held by Claremont Trumpists make it possible to identify Claremont as a center of political reproduction of Trumpism, to use the term of Pierre Bourdieu. (I also note below that Claremont functions as a hub for Trumpists outside of the academy as well.)

Sixteen Trumpists are affiliated with the Claremont Institute and/or the Claremont Review of Books. Moreover, 5 of the graduates from the Claremont Graduate University hold teaching positions at Hillsdale College – another academic center of Trumpists. There is no similar concentration of anti-Trumpists around a comparable set of institutions.

One also observes clear differences between the two groups regarding where they teach. The anti-Trump conservatives teach in the more prestigious universities. Forty-three percent (34 of 80) of the anti-Tumpists hold positions in the 50 top ranked universities whereas only twenty-six percent of the 102 Trumpists do. Moreover, the Trumpists tend to cluster in just a couple of lower ranked religious schools, such as the University of Dallas, conservative Catholic, (5), and Chapman University, Disciples of Christ and United Church of Christ (3).

Two observations are worth noting. While both groups clearly tend to concentrate in the more prestigious sector of the US field of higher education, the anti-Trumpists are clearly the more advantaged. They benefit from greater institutional symbolic capital. Second, the Trumpists are less likely to convert their credential capital into prestigious organizational positions within the academy (into organizational property – to use a term suggested by Collins (1979)) than are the anti-Trumpists.

:{:{If half (53 of the 102) of the Trumpists obtained their graduate degrees from among the 50 most prestigious schools in the academic field, only half of those (26 of 53) were able to secure teaching positions in similarly ranked schools.}:

By contrast, sixty-six percent (53 of the 80) anti-Trumpists graduated from one of the top 50 schools, and two-thirds (34 of 53) of those were able to make that kind of capital conversion. The anti-Trumpists were more able than the Trumpists to reproduce their location in the institutional prestige hierarchy from graduate school to the academic job market. Thus, on the whole, the anti-Trumpists hold greater institutional symbolic capital than do the Trumpists.}:

From credential capital to scholarly capital

But graduate credentials alone do not make a successful scholarly career. One must publish in peer reviewed journals or with academically recognized book publishers. Is it possible that the Trumpists were not as successful in converting their academic credential capital into productive post-graduate scholarship as were the anti-Trumpists? Could differences in scholarly productivity explain some of those differences? The Rothman and Lichter (2009) study finds that socially conservative professors tend to work at lower ranked institutions than their publication records would predict. Their findings suggest that conservative academics are actively discriminated against-a view held by conservatives.17

:{:{In the case of elite law schools, there is the 2016 Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy finding that libertarian and conservative professors publish more than their peers (cited by Shields, 2018). By contrast, Gross (2013:308) reports from a national representative survey sample of American professors that “conservative professors have lower levels of intellectual capital on average than liberal ones, including lower rates of doctoral degree holding, and this goes a fair way towards accounting for their lesser presence in elite institutions.”}:

My sample includes only those with PhD or law degrees. Although this article deals with cultural elites, its data still offer some support for the survey findings reported by Gross.}:

Review of the 182 professors suggests that the publication records of the anti-Trumpists are stronger than of the Trumpists.18 Does this observation hold up when examining more objective scholarly publication data?

...

Conservative think tanks

My analysis of think tanks draws inspiration from the seminal work of Medvetz (2012) who draws on a Bourdieusian field perspective to analyze think tanks. Medvetz (2012, pp. 23–46) conceptualizes think tanks as hybrid organizations that are “part academic research center, part technocratic agency, part advocacy group, part PR or lobbying firm.” They hold privileged positions within “an interstitial field” of power relations in which they produce public policy knowledge that reflects the cross-cutting and frequently opposing interests of scholarship, business, and media. In Bourdieusian terms, think tanks constitute a significant subfield within the field of power.27

Think tanks produce newsletters, journals, reports, conferences, and forums for public officials and the general public. Documenting their importance in American political life, Medvetz (2012) writes: “Over the past half-century, think tanks have become fixtures of American politics, supplying advice to presidents and policymakers, expert testimony on Capitol Hill, and convenient facts and figures to journalists and media specialists.” They have come to “exert a tremendous amount of influence on the way citizens and lawmakers perceive the world.” Vying with the media and universities, think tanks have come to exert tremendous amounts of symbolic power by helping to shape how policy makers, political leaders, and journalists understand the social world. They are prime sites where academics can exercise public intellectual roles.

The development of conservative intellectual markets, such as think tanks, has provided a voice—for some employment—and a venue of political solidarity outside of the purview of liberal campus politics. They function as opportunity structures for political engagement by conservative professors beyond the liberal academy.28 Medvetz (124–129) documents the tremendous growth and success of conservative think tanks beginning in the 1970s. Medvetz attributes their success to three key factors: their significant material support from big business, their relative freedom from state repression against left-oriented think tanks, and their relative freedom from university regulations. Freedom from identity politics and the left political culture of the universities proved attractive to conservative academics.

Medvetz (128) writes that already by the 1970s and 1980s “conservative movement leaders had come to regard the university as a hostile territory.” This view is echoed and lamented by the conservative political scientist Shields (2018) at Claremont McKenna College. Outside conservative think tanks represent an attractive place for their right-wing political preferences beyond the reach of the university. Today, eight distinctly conservative think tanks number among the top 50 most influential in the country.

How do the Trumpists and their critics line up? There are significant differences between the two groups in terms of external affiliations beyond the academy. As my earlier article (Swartz, 2020) reported, 75 percent of the Trumpists had external ties to non-governmental organizations, all conservative think tanks. In this data set, the 102 Trumpists hold 254 affiliations across 135 think tanks. The 80 anti-Trumpists hold 242 affiliations across 193 think tanks. Thus, the anti-Trump group affiliates across a broader range of think tanks.29 Moreover, the anti-Trumpists network to a greater extent than the Trumpists (3.1 connections per person to 2.5). It is as if the greater symbolic power in the academy translates into more activist capital in the field of power.

There are interesting contrasts in clusters of affiliations. The Trumpists tend to cluster around a few think tanks. There are 35 think tanks with 2 or more Trumpists, 19 with 4 or more, and 5 with 8 or more. The clustering tends to occur around ideologically oriented right-wing centers, such as the Claremont Institute (16), the Heritage Foundation (9), the Federalist Society (8), the Heartland Institute (8), the Independent institute (12), the League of the South (5), and the Abbeville Institute (4) (see Table 1) .30

Among the anti-Trumpists, 33 think tanks have 2 or more affiliations, and only 5 think tanks have 4 or more individuals affiliated. Thus, the Trump critics cluster less in think tank affiliations.

There is some degree of overlap in affiliations with a few large nationally important conservative think tanks, such as the Hoover Institution, the Cato Institute, and the Witherspoon Institute, where there are similar numbers affiliated from each group (Table 1). These think tanks can be described as broadly conservative or libertarian as in the case of the American Enterprise Institute and the Cato Institute. There are considerably more Trumpists affiliated with the Federalist Society (8), the Independent Institute (12), and the Heritage Foundation (9) that have more distinctly conservative orientations.

Many in the Federalist Society supported Trump for the purpose of conservative appointments to the Supreme Court. These would fit into the satisficed partisan category proposed by Kidder and Binder (2020). That appeared to be the case of Calabresi (2020), a co-founder of the Federalist Society and who voted for Trump in 2016.

He protested as unconstitutional the Robert Mueller investigation, he opposed Trump’s first impeachment, but then was "appalled by the president's later tweet seeking to postpone the 2020 November election.” Calabresi (2020) considered “this latest tweet… fascistic and is itself grounds for the president's immediate impeachment again by the House of Representatives and his removal from office by the Senate."

The Heritage Foundation is also notably more conservative politically in support of the Trump administration than the Hoover Institution, judging from a review of their respective web sites. Appreciably more (9 compared to 2) of the Trumpists are affiliated with the Heritage Foundation than of the non-Trumpists.

Table 1 shows other important differences between the two groups. More striking, however, is the pattern of Trumpists affiliations with a large number of smaller right-wing think tanks, such as the League of the South (5) and the Abbeville Institute (4), and particularly the concentration around just one—the Claremont Institute (16). These types of external affiliations held by many Trumpists point up their narrower extreme right-wing political ideological orientation. Notable examples would be the League of the South and the Abbeville Institute that celebrate the Southern history of the old Confederacy and embrace white nationalism.31 By contrast, one finds a more diverse range of conservative thinking represented by the think tanks where the anti-Trumpists affiliate.32

The Claremont Institute

One external affiliation stands out. The Claremont Institute (independent of Claremont McKenna college) attracts the largest number of Trumpists (16) but only 2 of the anti-Trumpists.33 It is the most important network hub for the Trumpists. It publishes the Claremont Review of Books, sometimes considered the conservative counterpart to the New York Review of Books, and runs a web site that has featured some of the most virulent populist support for Trump and criticism of traditional Republican conservatism (see Field, 2021). See in particular the writings of Anton (2016, 2019). It is the center of West Coast Straussian conservatism under the leadership of Charles R. Kesler.34 “If Trumpism had an intellectual home, it would be the Claremont Institute” writes Sean Illing (2021).

Figure 1 shows that the 16 Trumpists affiliated with the Claremont Institute create ties to 35 other think tanks and to 7 with two or more ties. Three of these think tanks rank among the 50 most influential in the United States. The graph points up the centrality of the Claremont Institute among the Trumpists. No other think tank, including the Heritage Foundation whose 9 Trumpists connect the Heritage to 25 other think tanks, comes close to the network centrality of the Claremont Institute. This suggests that the Trumpists participate in a fairly dense network of ties across several think tanks.

This does not mean that every individual associated with each of these think tanks is a Trumpist. The Heritage Foundation would be a case in point. Though conservative, not all affiliates with the Heritage Foundation support Trump. But the graph does suggest a concentration of Trumpist network ties within a limited number of think tanks rather than being broadly distributed across the entire spectrum of the most influential think tanks in the United States. By contrast, there is no analogous network hub for the anti-Trumpists. They distribute across a much broader array of external affiliations 35.

---}:

September 12, 2025, edition of The Megyn Kelly Show

MEGYN KELLY (HOST): This is a leftist narrative about Trump and about Charlie, as his supporter. So I mean, there's just no question this guy was buying the leftist narrative about Charlie and, yes, about Donald Trump. And they said he had become more political in recent years. Now how did that happen? What did he do in recent years? He went to college. Guess what college does? It radicalizes young people. I don't know what happened to this particular man, but that is what college does.

You know, we had Bill Ackman on this program talking about what happened to his daughter who went to Harvard and where they turned her into a Marxist socialist communist, which he was still trying to unwind. This is a liberal New York billionaire. That's what Harvard does to your kid.

It's just, look, I don't know what happened to this kid at the university. I'm just saying if we want to talk about circumstantial evidence on radicalization, there's zero for this kid being MAGA or a Republican or in any way in favor of Donald Trump. There's plenty of him hating Donald Trump.

People are like, oh, you know, he was just a gamer. The fact that he wrote these things on the bullets just show he was nothing but a gamer. Yeah, OK, you missed the part where, again, he wrote them on bullets with which he shot Charlie Kirk. Fuck these people and their revisionism, their unwillingness to see what's obvious.

// mma

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pjt 2025

November 27, 2024, edition of UnHerd, streamed on YouTube

FREDDIE SAYER (HOST): Ivy League colleges. You don't have many nice words to say about the Ivy League schools.

KEVIN ROBERTS (HERITAGE FOUNDATION): Very few.

SAYER: You're very uncompromising about that. It's not that they need radical reform and being turned upside down. You say in terms that you think they should be destroyed.

ROBERTS: I say that unless they end the implementation of the woke mind virus, and if they continue to live off the teats of government -- through research grants, through participating in Title IV federal student loans and grants -- then it's perfectly appropriate, as the Vice President-elect said in his senatorial campaign, for the federal government to seize their endowments. Because they are using that money to fund nonsense. Actually, to empower the Chinese Communist Party's infiltration of our institutions, which is yet another problem that motivates my aggressiveness. And thirdly, educational attainment at those colleges -- those colleges in particular has gone down.

SAYER: So what the federal government, in this scenario, would seize the entire endowment of a college like Harvard University, for example?

ROBERTS: Unless Harvard wants to stop living off the public dole, it would be perfectly appropriate.

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note not xo?

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Trump will sign a memorandum ordering colleges and universities to submit information on their admissions to ensure they are complying with a 2023 U.S. Supreme Court order banning affirmative action and gutting race-conscious admissions. The order would expand the current admissions data the government collects.

“Admissions data has increasingly become a focus of the Trump administration as part of its effort to change the ideological balance of the higher education system, which the president views as hostile to conservatives,” The New York Times reported.

Several Ivy League schools have agreed to hand over to the Trump administration certain admissions data, including “standardized test scores and grade point averages of all applicants, as well as information about their race, a measure that could profoundly alter the competitive college admissions process,” according to the Times.

READ MORE: Governor Wants Maps to Reflect State’s ‘Christian Conservative Majority’ Says GOP Lawmaker

The 2023 6-3 Supreme Court ruling banned public and private colleges and universities from considering race as a factor in its admissions decisions. Schools had said they needed to do so to protect the constitutional guarantee of equal protection, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor said in her dissenting opinion.

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Bloomberg News called Thursday’s order “a new and expansive front” in the Trump administration’s “pressure campaign against colleges.”

Angel Perez, CEO of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, Bloomberg added, “said the data transparency mandate could drive institutions away from the kinds of holistic admissions practices that have helped them increase diversity on campuses.”

“The bottom line,” Perez said, “is that colleges that don’t admit enough White students will be punished.”

READ MORE: Trump Revives Constitutionally Conflicting Census Overhaul Plan

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AN 7 25

In its clash with Columbia University, the Trump (https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/trump) administration is touting a historic $221 million settlement as a major triumph for conservative ideology—even though it had originally framed the case as a response to antisemitism on college campuses. On Thursday, Education Secretary Linda McMahon hailed the outcome as a “monumental victory for conservatives” while condemning “far-left-leaning professors.”

“Under the terms of the deal to resolve several federal probes into allegations that it had violated anti-discrimination laws,” CNN (https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/23/politics/columbia-trump-administration-settlement-federal-funding) reported, “Columbia did not admit to wrongdoing but agreed to pay the government a $200 million settlement over three years and an additional $21 million to settle US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission investigations.”

Secretary McMahon, CNN added, “heralded the outcome as a ‘seismic shift in our nation’s fight to hold institutions that accept American taxpayer dollars accountable for antisemitic discrimination and harassment,'” and called it “a roadmap for elite universities that wish to regain the confidence of the American public by renewing their commitment to truth-seeking, merit, and civil debate.”

READ MORE: Tuberville: Dems Must ‘Lawyer Up’ for Plot to Make America ‘Communist’ (https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2025/07/tuberville-dems-must-lawyer-up-for-plot-to-make-america-communist/)

Thursday morning on Fox News Business, Secretary McMahon offered a different explanation.

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“I think that this is a monumental victory for conservatives who’ve wanted to do things in these elite campuses for a long time, because we had such far-left-leaning, you know, professors, and we had 27% of the students that are coming in, you know, are from outside of the United States,” McMahon told host Maria Bartiromo. She noted that the 27% was a statistic from Harvard.

“I’m really pleased with this victory,” McMahon continued. “It wouldn’t have happened if Donald Trump were not president, then I’m really pleased to execute his vision for this, that our campuses are now, what they should be. They are places for debate, they are places for education.”

“They’re not places for left-leaning riots and antisemitism, and I’m really pleased with this result.”

Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, wrote (https://x.com/amyspitalnick/status/1948363760088891676) in response to McMahon’s remarks: “This is about advancing an extreme agenda.”

READ MORE: GOP Congressman: ‘Round Everybody Up and Deport Them All’ (https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2025/07/gop-congressman-round-everybody-up-and-deport-them-all/)

“This administration,” Spitalnick said, “continues to exploit real concerns about antisemitism to undermine our core democratic norms & institutions. This is not about keeping Jews safe — if it were, they wouldn’t have gutted OCR [Office for Civil Rights] & other key protections.”

Constitutional law professor and political scientist Anthony Michael Kreis warned (https://x.com/AnthonyMKreis/status/1948360601450787251), “Columbia has now allowed itself to be regulated by a deal. A complete capitulation to the state, yielding their academic freedom to select their students, appoint their faculty, and adopt their curriculum. The Fellows of Magdalen College had more courage against James II in 1687.”

Jordan Acker, who serves on the University of Michigan’s Board of Regents noted (https://x.com/JordanAckerMI/status/1948357432465330485):

“Three things can be true here: -Campus faculty, especially in the humanities, needs reform -Antisemitism is a problem on campus -Trump simply cares about destroying higher ed. One and two are fixable. The third is a dire threat to the American way of life and must be fought.”

Watch the video below or at this link (https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2025/07/education-secretary-hails-columbia-settlement-as-monumental-victory-over-far-left/).

HARV BLK WOMan pres resign plag BS stefanik 2 dn 1 to go?

Fox host blames the "spider-like cancer" that is diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives for antisemitism | Media Matters for America (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-host-blames-spider-cancer-diversity-equity-and-inclusion-initiatives-antisemitism)

CONTEXT

yikes an 7 25

critics of far-right Oklahoma Schools Superintendent Ryan Walters often attack him as a highly performative MAGA troll. Walters' antics include purchasing Donald Trump-themed Bibles for classrooms (https://www.kgou.org/education/2024-10-04/ryan-walters-classroom-bible-policy-appears-to-favor-trump-sold-bibles-in-6-million-plan) and promoting the false, repeatedly debunked conspiracy theory that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump (https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/trump).

But Slate's Molly Olmstead, in an article published on July 22 (https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/07/oklahoma-woke-teacher-screenings-ryan-walters.html), emphasizes that Walters' buffoonish qualities don't make him any less dangerous. And she emphasizes that his plan to screen education applicants for MAGA purity shouldn't be taken lightly.

"This month," Olmstead explains, "Oklahoma's education department announced an innovative new approach to screening aspiring teachers in the state: any applicants from 'woke' states would need to first pass an ideology test created by the right-wing group PragerU. It was an announcement that seemed engineered to draw national news coverage and inflame liberal audiences. Under this plan, teachers from states with 'progressive education policies' would be tested on the U.S. Constitution, American exceptionalism, and 'the fundamental biological differences between boys and girls.'"

READ MORE: This White House lie shows they know Trump is in trouble (https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/trump-health-2673611965/)

Olmstead continues, "The screening is guaranteed to test teachers for a deeply MAGA-inflected understanding of U.S. history, government, and society: PragerU, a right-wing group with a stated mission of countering leftism in education, is already known for its white nationalist-adjacent content for schoolchildren."

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PragerU is the brainchild of Dennis Prager, a far-right talk radio host and Trump supporter.

"Walters' proposals for the school system have included a mandate that all public schools teach the Bible; a plan to collect children's immigration status when they register for public school; and new social studies standards proposals that would have high school students 'identify discrepancies in 2020 election results,'" Olmstead observes. "Each of these announcements solidified Walters' reputation as a relentless attention-seeker, calculating every action from his office to appeal to the power players of the MAGA movement…. These stunts have paid off. Walters has been profiled in outlets all over the country, and he has become the face of the Christian nationalist campaigns into public education."

The MAGA Republican's stunts, Olmstead argues, raise the question: "Is Walters all superficiality, a media-obsessive without the stamina or standing for real, transformative politics? Or is he actually capable of remaking Oklahoma's schools — and signaling what MAGA could bring to schools across the country?"

READ MORE:GOP sen tells constituent he’s 'not obligated to listen' after she’s denied care over marital status (https://www.alternet.org/news-politics/tennessee-health-care/)

"In sign of just how bizarre American politics have become in this second Trump era," Olmstead warns, "Walters may be a bit of both. As traditional institutions and procedures buckle under MAGA politics, Walters has proven that with the right national climate, slapdash own-the-lib pronouncements can become serious policy. He's a performer, but he also happens to be a major change-maker…. It may be tempting not to take people like Walters seriously, but he has proven that with enough volume, some gimmicks stick."

READ MORE:'Errand boy': Trump official reveals what president talks about during nightly 1 AM calls (https://www.alternet.org/trump/trump-official-nightly-calls/)

*Molly Olmstead's full article for Slate is available at this link (https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/07/oklahoma-woke-teacher-screenings-ryan-walters.html) (subscription required).

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Why are right-wingers so scared of ideas?

Are their minds so weak that mere exposure to certain books will infect them with what Elon Musk calls “the woke mind virus”?

They don’t want you inoculated against measles, but they’re doing their damnedest to inoculate Americans against knowledge.

Novels upset them; poetry (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/amanda-gormans-inauguration-poem-banned-by-florida-school) upsets them; science upsets them; history upsets them; art upsets them; questioning of authority upsets them.

Universities really, really upset them — all that interrogating norms; all that challenging orthodoxy; all that critical inquiry.

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To that end, Donald Trump’s going to war (http://www.nytimes.com/article/trump-university-college.html) with Harvard, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, even Penn, his alma mater.

Ron DeSantis beat him to it: The governor’s been trying for years to regulate speech, impose restrictions (https://floridaphoenix.com/2022/11/21/florida-is-turning-its-back-on-the-new-south-embracing-its-dixie-fied-past/) on what teachers can teach, and decree which books the state of Florida finds “acceptable.”

While he’s had some success in K-12, enabling Moms for Liberty and their ilk in their book-banning crusade and threatening educators with dire consequences if they mention the existence of gay and trans people, some judges, unsurprisingly partial to the First Amendment, have slapped him down.

DeSantis, nothing if not energetic in his rage, is now determined to shield our precious college students from Dangerous Thoughts.

Choose the administrators. Choose the presidents. Control the universities.

The University of Florida needs a new dean of Liberal Arts and Sciences — with 40 majors and more than 10,000 students, it’s the largest college at UF.

They got as far as interviewing four highly qualified candidates: two mathematicians — UF’s own Kevin P. Knudson and Maggy Tomova, dean of UCF’s College of Science; Ryan Schroeder, dean of Georgia Southern’s College of Behavioral and Social Sciences; and Robert Brinkmann, a professor of Geology and dean of Liberal Arts and Science at Northern Illinois University.

‘Radical DEI progressives’

But two weeks ago, the governor blew up the search. Demanded UF stop it.

Seems the finalists, admired scholars and seasoned leaders, are crypto-Marxist, Trump-hating eggheads bent on destroying America.

An anonymous social media account calling itself “Commies on Campus” ran shrieking to Bryan Griffin, DeSantis’ communications director, calling all four “ radical DEI progressives (http://www.tampabay.com/news/florida-politics/2025/04/28/desantis-uf-university-search-dean-liberal-arts-college/).”

The Commies posted slick, selectively edited videos of candidate interviews, slamming (https://x.com/CommiesonCampus/status/1915039971112571062) Brinkmann for stating the obvious: “We have people in charge of things in our country that don’t have any business being in charge of those things,” and Knudson for being proud that as head of UF’s Honors Program “we were able to increase the number of African American and Hispanic students in the program.”

As if that’s somehow shameful.

Kent Fuchs, UF’s invertebrate of an interim president, sent out a memo pretending “terminating the search” was the only thing to do, what with the university also in the middle of hiring a permanent president.

Fuchs has never said no to DeSantis.

He does as he’s told, facilitating the hiring of our data-challenged surgeon general at UF’s medical school and trying to stop professors (https://floridaphoenix.com/2021/11/15/desantis-reveled-in-u-f-s-top-5-status-now-his-minions-threaten-its-academic-freedom/)from testifying on voting rights.

Academic freedom doesn’t matter; the professors’ expertise might pose a “conflict of interest to the executive branch of the state of Florida.”

As if serving the interests of the executive branch should somehow be the mission of a university.

UF remains a distinguished institution, though slipping in national rankings of public universities. It was No. 5 a couple of years ago but is now No. 7.

Still pretty good, especially given DeSantis’ obsessive attacks on higher education in the state.

But allowing some trifling X account to dictate policy at Florida’s flagship university won’t exactly burnish UF’s reputation.

All-purpose insult

Whoever the “Commies on Campus” may be, they weren’t paying attention in political science class.

They call anything they don’t like “communist:” LGBTQ, feminism, secularism, programs for the poor, addressing the climate crisis, taxing the rich, giving anyone without one of those useful White Man Cards a fair shot in life.

“Communist” is MAGA’s all-purpose insult.

Read a book, kids: While real live commies like the ones in North Korea, Cuba, or China may think religion is the opiate of the masses and rich folks (except the leaders of these countries) shouldn’t exist, they’re not keen on stuff like feminism, they persecute gay people, and they sure as hell don’t favor DEI.

Ask the Uighurs (http://www.hrw.org/news/2023/09/13/chinas-beautiful-xinjiang-continues-oppress-uighurs).

Yet DeSantis, a man educated beyond his intelligence, takes what these nameless chuckleheads say at face value.

There are in fact a number of well-regarded Marxist scholars at American universities. Yale, the governor’s alma mater, has a reading group studying Marxism and Cultural Theory (https://whc.yale.edu/programs/working-groups/marxism-and-cultural-theory).

Nevertheless, DeSantis emerged from the Red Menace of New Haven untainted.

He’s also unimpeded by understanding what universities are supposed to do.

An academic’s job is to research everything from the Roman Republic to astrophysics to Norse sagas to gene structure to the ideology of slavery to economic and political systems, which requires reading across the spectrum from “Das Kapital” to “ The Road to Serfdom (http://www.cato.org/policy-report/november/december-2022/hayeks-collected-works)“ and presenting their data and knowledge to students.

We call this “education.”

It’s embarrassing how MAGAs deem Hungarian (or Putinist) authoritarianism OK, even admirable, while “communist” is the gravest of insults and socialism is a mortal sin.

Perhaps they’re unaware socialism is viewed favorably by around 36% (http://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2022/09/19/modest-declines-in-positive-views-of-socialism-and-capitalism-in-u-s/)of Americans.

That’s almost the same number who say they strongly support Donald Trump. (https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/trump)

Ideas are not viruses

The point is, ideas are not viruses: Mere exposure to communist thought doesn’t turn you into a communist, any more than reading James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room” makes you gay, any more than reading “The Wealth of Nations” ensures you’ll become a rabid capitalist.

But MAGAs don’t do high-level thinking: It makes their heads hurt. They simply react.

Loudly. Ignorantly. Irrationally.

Commies on Campus now has a new project: trying to influence who will become the new president of the University of Florida.

UF has announced a finalist.

One finalist. Chosen in secret.

He is Dr. Santa Ono, a Canadian American immunologist.

The Commies say he’s some kind of woke monster who, as president of the University of Michigan, created “THE LARGEST #DEI EMPIRE in the country.”

Their evidence? Christopher Rufo, the febrile New College trustee last heard claiming immigrants were eating cats and dogs (https://floridaphoenix.com/2024/09/23/lying-like-a-champ-for-america/), calls Ono “left-wing” and points to a 2023 commencement address in which he made the unimpeachable statement, “The climate crisis is the existential challenge of our time.”

Florida gubernatorial candidate and Trump acolyte U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, never losing a chance to ingratiate himself with MAGA voters, demands UF “ go back to the drawing board (http://www.tampabay.com/news/education/2025/05/07/conservative-voices-are-pushing-back-uf-presidential-pick-ono/).”

Donalds’ hair is on fire because Ono once said, “Racism is one of America’s original sins.”

Deep breath, people: 1. Both of Ono’s statements are perfectly true; and 2. Rufo, Donalds, and the Commies need to update their intel.

Ono has changed his tune. No longer a champion of diversity, he’s now singing from the DeSantis Hymnal, declaring himself in “total alignment” with the governor’s anti-woke crusade.

“I have the same views as this governor,” Ono said.

Bend the knee

During his three years at Michigan (the shortest tenure of any president in the university’s history), Ono initially won praise for prioritizing sustainability and anti-racist projects. Students say he was personable and accessible.

Then Trump happened, and, like too many university administrators, he bent the knee, shutting UM’s DEI office, cracking down on student protest, and creating, as one faculty member said, “ a surveillance state (http://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2025/05/05/santa-ono-leaving-for-university-of-florida-reactions/83460844007/).”

Seems he deployed plainclothes officers police to trail and photograph people on UM’s campus.

No wonder DeSantis likes this guy.

Santa is a real scholar, a proper scientist, with academic and administrative qualifications that could have been a great fit at UF. He’s streets ahead of DeSantis’ last hand-picked president, the empty, in-over-his-head Ben Sasse, whose one discernable talent was spending (https://www.alligator.org/article/2024/08/sasse-s-spending-spree-former-uf-president-channeled-millions-to-gop-allies-secretive-contracts)other people’s money.

In a Trump-free world, Ono might have become the leader who could protect the institution. He might have pushed back against the governor’s determination to reduce Florida’s universities to football factories with libraries curated by the likes of Christopher Rufo and courses insisting on the divine greatness of America.

Alas, Ono has made clear that’s not him, not anymore.

This is what you get when one incurious, anti-intellectual, and perpetually angry man chooses university presidents in secret.

This is what you get when there’s only one finalist.

Yes, the trustees officially make the job offer, but there’s no chance they’d hire someone DeSantis didn’t like.

This is the reality of higher ed in Florida today.

FIU has one finalist for president. No shock that it’s DeSantis’ former lieutenant governor and Interim President Jeannette Nuñez.

In its presidential search, FAU announced three finalists. Maybe this would be a real contest?

Two had Ph.Ds. and solid higher ed experience. One was a Republican political hack.

You can guess who got the gig.

A ‘plant’ at FAMU?

Florida A&M, still in the process of choosing a president, has four finalists.

Promising, right?

There were initially three on the shortlist, all with extensive university experience. Then a fourth candidate, a woman with ties to top Republicans, appeared.

She’s Marva Johnson, a communications company executive, appointed by then-Gov. Rick Scott to the Florida Board of Education and chosen by Ron DeSantis for the Florida Scholars Academy Board of Trustees.

Commies on Campus have not yet weighed in on this one.

FAMU alumni say she’d be a terrible choice, calling her “ a plant (https://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/local/famu-news/2025/05/08/town-hall-makes-clear-whos-welcome-as-famu-president-and-whos-not/83498446007/)” and likening her to a Trojan Horse hostile to the university’s mission.

But what the alumni want, and what the university wants, probably won’t matter.

What DeSantis wants matters.

As everyone in the unfree state of Florida knows, all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE. SUPPORT (https://floridaphoenix.com/donate/?oa_referrer=midstorybox)

Florida Phoenix (https://floridaphoenix.com/) is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com.

an 212 23

in recent years, more college graduates (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/23/educational-divide-between-voters-is-growing/) — especially college-educated women (https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/data-download/women-men-college-degrees-good-news-democrats-rcna100833) — have been favoring Democrats over Republicans.

Far-right House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) discussed this trend during a conversation with Rep. Dan Crenshaw (https://twitter.com/highbrow_nobrow/status/1739443445616324799) (R-Texas), claiming that college students are being "indoctrinated" by liberals and progressives. But social media users have been pushing back against Johnson's argument, many of them responding that the GOP's extreme policies — not indoctrination — are driving college-educated voters away.

Johnson told Crenshaw (https://twitter.com/highbrow_nobrow/status/1739443445616324799), "The reasons that…. the Republican Party is attracting, less and less, more highly educated voters is because they spent so much time in the academy. And the universities are run…. usually by liberals almost entirely. And sometimes, by radical liberals, socialists and others. And so, these students are being indoctrinated instead of educated."

After The Intellectualist retweeted a video of the conversation (https://twitter.com/patriottakes/status/1729274507666325802) on X, formerly Twitter, on Christmas Day 2023, many users shot down Johnson's argument.

Former CIA analyst Gail Helt (https://twitter.com/ghelt/status/1739466176118354127) tweeted, "So people who have voted Republican in multiple elections, who finished college decades ago, are just now falling prey to alleged brainwashing? I don't think so."

Deborah Kay, a former Republican, posted (https://twitter.com/wncgirl2022/status/1739444779820237170), "Wrong.. I'm college educated but that has absolutely nothing to do with me leaving the Republican Party. I left mentally in 2015 when Trump came down that escalator, then the October 2016 recording with Billy Bush pushed me further away, then J6 is what made me leave completely."

Kay also tweeted (https://twitter.com/wncgirl2022/status/1739652867248591223), "I refused to vote for anyone in the Tea Party but I definitely felt I was seeing the future of the Republican Party, even then. And it's turned out much worse. I was always more middle of the road and voted both sides of the aisle but I've voted straight Democrat since 2016."

READ MORE:New House Speaker Mike Johnson is quietly frightening (https://www.alternet.org/mike-johnson-2666304250/)

Journalist Bette Dangerous (https://twitter.com/Heidi_Cuda/status/1739697717042180579) posted, "I'm sure this Putinist with the loud closet bones failed to mention Turning Point is the fastest growing group on college campuses — that truth would get in the way of his Russian propaganda."

Pundit Jeri Walker wrote (https://twitter.com/jwalker0X/status/1739609523021652101), "My experience in college was one of discovery. I chose my required subjects carefully & based on my personal curiosity. I chose my electives based on my personal curiosity. I chose to expand my knowledge so I could understand my world more. NO ONE ever tried to indoctrinate me."

Another X user, Gayle Dourn Plantz (https://twitter.com/plantz3610/status/1739647794431013295), tweeted, "There's a positive correlation between education levels & being a Democrat or independent. There's a negative correlation between education levels & religion So yeah, more educated folks tend to be less into religion and more into actually improving the lives of average citizens."

Activist Kitty Ann Swink (https://twitter.com/KitSwink/status/1739705184035701112) told Johnson, "Actually Mike, they educate them.

READ MORE:Mike Johnson's 'Christian nationalism' is 'a greater threat to America than al-Qaida': strategist (https://www.alternet.org/johnson-nationalism-al-qaida/)

*Watch the video below or at this link (https://www.alternet.org/mike-johnson-christian-2666812697).

https://www.mediamatters.org/rachel-campos-duffy/fox-host-claims-teachers-are-all-licensed-through-these-marxist-teaching

8 23 mma

:{CAMPOS-DUFFY (FOX NEWS CO-HOST): It's interesting. This is actually a charter school which claims to be a classical education, and so they've had to do a big, you know, turn around on their point because the parents are really upset. They think, but this a great example -- first, I wanna talk about a couple things. The mom, so calm. I'm impressed. Like, I wouldn't be that calm. Like, you know me. I'm not gonna go in be that nice about it, but kind of very politely educated the teacher who is not very educated, doesn't understand American history, and tried to associate with racism or something like that. So that's one thing. Two, the boy. He's so polite. He's so well-mannered.

There was a subsequent video where he comes back, he had just done some podcasts and, you know, sort of gave his point of view and said, you know, I've come back, a lot of kids are now -- he came back to school and other kids are putting don't tread on me patches all over their lockers and their backpacks, and he said, this the sad part, he said I made some new friends, kids that I didn't know before that are now supportive of me, but the teachers were so mean to me, some of the teachers. How disgusting is that? So that was really bothersome.This is a reminder that you are your child's first and most important teacher. That mother taught that son about what don't tread on me. The rattlesnake was the symbol of America because the rattlesnake, if you try to step on it, it's gonna bite you back, and so this is a symbol of standing up. That's what that boy was doing. He's so -- he's such a patriot, I thought, I think that Brian Kilmeade is gonna adopt him.}:

...

CAMPOS-DUFFY: Well, we see all these scores on how our kids are doing on these, you know, on these national tests and history's very bad. We need to give these tests to the teachers. 

STEVE DOOCY (CO-HOST): I thought they did before they got their teaching certificate.

CAMPOS-DUFFY: No, because they all get licensed through these Marxist teaching schools that we have inside of all these universities. That's also why you have teachers that turn out like that, that have no idea about American history. They don't care about it. They get hired by a classical academy, a charter school where parents are supposedly pulling their kids out of public school to get a better education, and here's what they get. So just always be alert.

an 8 23 no lnx

Texas A&M leaders’ text messages reveal desire to counteract perceived liberal agenda in higher education

Kate McGeeandThe Texas Tribune August 05, 2023

"Texas A&M leaders’ text messages show desire to counteract perceived liberal agenda in higher education" was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

Two years ago during M. Katherine Banks’ first six months as the president of Texas A&M University, she announced a major academic reorganization of the flagship campus to help it become an internationally recognized top-tier institution. Her plans included dozens of structural changes meant to streamline and better organize the largest public university in the state.

But text messages released by the Texas A&M University System this week revealed another largely unspoken focus among system leaders that might have also been at play as the school reorganized.

“Kathy [Banks] told us multiple times the reason we were going to combine [the colleges of] arts and sciences together was to control the liberal nature that those professors brought to campus,” regent Jay Graham wrote to regent David Baggett in June as they were discussing the university’s plans to hire journalism professor and former New York Times editor Kathleen O. McElroy. “[W]e were going to start a journalism department to get high-quality conservative Aggie students into the journalism world to help direct our message. This won’t happen with this type of hire!”

Those messages were released as part of an internal investigation conducted to review the failed attempt to hire McElroy, which has rattled the Aggie community in recent weeks amid concerns over how political considerations impact A&M’s operations and academic freedom.

The messages show that many board members, who are gubernatorial appointees, had concerns with McElroy’s perceived left-leaning credentials, including that she taught at the University of Texas at Austin and previously worked at the New York Times. At least some of them displayed a desire to promote conservative causes at the flagship campus and a blatant resistance to recruiting someone who they believed would work counter to those goals.

“While it is wonderful for a successful Aggie to want to come back to Texas A&M to be a tenured professor and build something this important from scratch, we must look at her résumé and her statements made an opinion pieces and public interviews,”regent Mike Hernandezwrote to former president Banks and Chancellor John Sharp, expressing disappointment that the board learned of the hire after it had been announced.

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}:

“The New York Times is one of the leading main stream media sources in our country. It is common knowledge that they are biased and progressive leaning. The same exact thing can be said about the university of Texas,” he continued.

Those perspectives are consistent with Texas conservatives’ recent attempts to counteract what they view as a liberal agenda within Texas’ public universities.

“People on the right think that the left controls education and they've been trying to wrestle that control away,” said Jennifer Mercieca, a communications professor at Texas A&M who focuses on the intersection of democracy and communication. “Unfortunately, our journalism program got caught in the middle of that.”

In Texas, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has largely led that crusade within the state’s public universities. A few years ago, he was part of initial discussions with UT-Austin leaders and donors to create a conservative-leaning think tank that would bring “intellectual diversity” to the school. This year, he championed legislation that eliminates diversity, equity and inclusion offices on college campuses, offices that are largely viewed by conservatives as pushing left-leaning ideologies onto students. Patrick also tried to eliminate tenure for faculty, a longstanding tenet meant to bolster academic freedom on campuses.

“People have had it with the intolerance of any ideas but progressive, DEI, propaganda-ish kinds of ideas on campus,” said Sherry Sylvester, a former aide for Patrick who now works as a public policy fellow at the conservative-leaningTexas Public Policy Foundation and was an ardent supporter of the legislation to eliminate DEI programs this past session. “That is a big effort, a big movement.”

The impact of that movement was on display in the records Texas A&M released this week surrounding the failed effort to recruit McElroy.

Soon after making an initial offer to McElroy, Banks communicated that she wanted to push the announcement until after the most recent legislative session ended. At the time, university leaders, including those at Texas A&M, were negotiating with lawmakers over the DEI legislation, as well as state funding for public universities.

“Bottom line is that the NYT connection is poor optics during this particular legislative session,” Jose Bermúdez, interim dean of the college of arts and science, said to Hart Blanton, chair of the communications and journalism department, via text message on May 11.

Meanwhile, regents expressed disdain for media and academics they saw as liberal leaning. While regents approve tenure, it is typically unusual for them to get involved in university-level hires. The Texas A&M regents oversee 11 public universities and eight state agencies that employ more than 26,000 faculty across the state.

Higher education experts say that education has long been characterized as political. Recent efforts in places likeTexas, North Carolina and Florida have picked up partially due to how well the Republican base responds to the accusations.

:{:{}:

}:

“The notion of woke ideology, and how it supposedly has done all this damage to things has just risen as a political talking point,” said Holden Thorp, former chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a current professor at George Washington University. “It's easy to say the universities are the places that you want to attack this,” citing that the argument has increasingly shown to poll well among conservatives.

According to the internal report A&M released Thursday, Banks received calls from six to seven regents after Texas Scorecard, a conservative website, wrote an article about McElroy that painted her as a “DEI proponent” for her prior research to improve diversity in newsrooms. Board member Sam Torn emailed a quote from the article to Board Chair Bill Mahomes stating he wanted an explanation before he could approve McElroy’s tenure.

The internal report revealed that Banks was heavily involved in behind-the-scenes discussions to walk back the original offer given to McElroy, contradicting Banks’ previous public statements that she had no knowledge of changes to the offer. Banks resigned two weeks before her text messages were made public.

The internal report showed that regents also raised questions about whether they could approve tenure for McElroy, even though she already had been selected through the university’s standard hiring process.

:{:{}:

}:

“Granting tenure to somebody with this background is going to be a difficult sell for many on the [board of regents],” Hernandez said in an email to Banks and Sharp. “My sincere hope is that you both will figure out a way to completely put the brakes on this, so we all can discuss this further. If it’s truly too far down the road for you all to agree to that, the board majority can decide how to proceed and take the heat for the final call.”

Thorp said the regents’ meddling in the university’s hiring process overstepped their role.

“When they approve tenure, what they're doing is saying that they have confidence in the administration to carry out the process that they said,” Thorp said. “The role of the board is to rule against it, if for some reason they think the process wasn't followed. Well, in this case, the process wasn't followed, not because of the content or anything, but because [Banks] didn't put the case forward because of politics.”

Some of the regents also took issue with what they perceived as McElroy’s bias toward conservative viewpoints.

“We can’t just give people a set of facts anymore,” McElroy said in an interview on the public radio program "Here & Now” in 2021. “I think we know that and we have to tell our students that. This is not about getting two sides of a story or three sides of a story, if one side is illegitimate. I think now you cannot cover education, you cannot cover criminal justice, you can’t cover all of these institutions without recognizing how all these institutions were built.”

Sylvester with TPPF pointed to that quote as the reason she was against McElroy’s hiring for the journalism program. She declined to comment on the regents’ text messages but said her organization wants to see more free inquiry within higher education.

“No one is looking for a conservative ideology to drive higher ed,” she said. “But taxpayers and conservative leaders no longer want to underride a left wing divisive ideology that permeates so much of the curriculum.”

Thorp said as the politicization of higher education increases and decisions are made based on politics over policy and procedure, it makes universities “ungovernable.”

“I'm certainly not defending Kathy Banks and her dishonest actions in this, but part of the reason why she resorted to that, probably, is that she didn't have many other choices,” said Thorp, referring to her role in watering down McElroy’s job offer. “Every time you have to do something you're facing this intractable situation where you're either going to get the campus against you or get the board against you. And that's how not functional organizations work.”

Mercieca at Texas A&M said the internal report revealed how McElroy’s hiring was a victim of intervention that creates distrust within what are supposed to be democratic processes within universities.

“What we learned yesterday is that all of those institutional processes and procedures can be overruled by fiat, by powerful others,” she said. “It's not democratic.”

Disclosure: Texas A&M University, Texas Public Policy Foundation, New York Times, Texas A&M University System and University of Texas at Austin have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2023/08/04/texas-am-mcelroy-texts/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

'It all came flooding back': Trump indictment hard on lawmakers left in House Gallery on January 6

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omg

no lnx

https://www.alternet.org/critical-race-theory-2659941137/

twenty or 30 years ago, most consumers of right-wing media didn't know what critical race theory (CRT) was. Many liberals and progressives, for that matter, were unfamiliar with CRT — a college-level African-American studies discipline that, in essence, argues that racism of the past affects present-day institutions.

But in recent years, CRT has become a major boogieman in right-wing media and among MAGA Republicans. MAGA pundits and politicians, according to their liberal critics, have weaponized the term CRT and used it to attack any book or article that makes them uncomfortable — be it "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" or Alice Walker's "The Color Purple."

:{:{}:

}:

Scholar Stanley Kurtz is among the right-wing figures who has been railing against CRT, but his efforts go beyond trying to keep books out of public schools.

READ MORE: Why Texas Republicans’ crusade against 'woke civics' does students a huge disservice: report

Reporter Asher Lehrer-Small, in an article published by The 74 on May 2, emphasizes that Kurtz has "spearheaded a quiet but influential campaign to cleanse classrooms of what he calls 'woke civics.'" According to Lehrer-Small, Kurtz's "advocacy in Texas led to the 2021 passage of an unprecedented state law banning assignments that involve 'direct communication' between students and their federal, state or local lawmakers."

The reporter notes, "At the core of Kurtz's activism is a central idea: that hands-on civics lessons, such as students writing to their legislators, will lead to 'school-sponsored indoctrination and political action in support of progressive policy positions'…. Accurate or not, Kurtz's depiction of 'woke civics' is now being felt in America's classrooms."

Lehrer-Small adds, "When the scholar penned his model legislation in 2021, which said students should be banned from receiving class credit for 'lobbying' or 'advocacy' at the federal, state or local level, lawmakers and advocates across the country pounced."

:{:{}:

}:

The reporter notes some specific examples of Kurtz's influence. In 2022, for instance, Democratic Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware and GOP Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, according to Lehrer-Smalls, proposed a bipartisan bill that called for increasing grants for civics education. But the bill was "stopped in tracks" when Kurtz labeled it CRT. AndFlorida Gov. Ron DeSantis "mimicked" Kurtz's messaging by claiming that the bill would "award grants to indoctrinate students with ideologies like critical race theory."

READ MORE: 'Censorial filters are unconstitutional': DeSantis' aim to control FL colleges' academic freedom worsens

Read Asher Lehrer-Small's full report for The 74 at this link. https://www.the74million.org/article/the-conservative-scholar-who-convinced-gop-lawmakers-civics-conceals-crt/

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proxy for pinko prof? strict fr?

mma 3 23

As the Biden administration defends the president’s policy of canceling up to $20,000 of student debt for millions of Americans against a Republican-backed challenge before the Supreme Court, some right-wing commentators are going beyond their old arguments against the policy to make truly outrageous claims about it.

When President Joe Biden first announced his administration’s plan in August to address the very real problem of student debt doubling (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/22/us-student-debt-has-increased-by-more-than-100percent-over-past-10-years.html) in the past decade, which affects (https://educationdata.org/student-loan-debt-economic-impact) tens of millions of Americans (https://www.theguardian.com/money/2021/may/30/us-student-loan-payments-pandemic), conservatives tried arguing (https://www.mediamatters.org/education/right-wing-media-rush-attack-student-debt-forgiveness-will-benefit-millions) that the policy was unfair, would raise inflation, would favor the rich, and had no legal basis.

But when arguments about the policy reached the Supreme Court yesterday (https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/28/politics/student-loan-forgiveness-supreme-court-arguments-takeaways/index.html), some right-wing media figures went far beyond their previous opposition to the policy and levied some egregious new attacks:

Fox News host Mark Levin (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4001291) called Biden’s student loan cancellation policy “a fascistic act by an out-of-control man” who is “cheered by the Marxists in the country.”

OutKick founder Clay Travis: (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4001294) “This was a transparent political attempt by Joe Biden to rig in his favor the 2022 election.”

Travis (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4001297) again portrayed the student debt cancellation policy as a voter turnout scheme: Biden “wanted to drive up young voters’ turnout as much as he could.”

Fox contributor Liz Peek: (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4001282) “You can't just dole out $400 billion to get votes, which is basically what this is all about.”

Media Research Center’s Stephanie Hamill (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4001288) said “it’s almost like a bribery” of voters.

Newsmax host Rob Schmitt (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4001287) said it’s a “vote-buying scheme” to get people “on the narcotic of social welfare.”

Schmitt (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4001289) later portrayed student debt cancellation as Biden wanting “to dump hundreds of billions of dollars that we don't have on 8-balls, Jack Daniels, and flights to Mexico.”

Fox contributor Marc Thiessen (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4001236) claimed student debt cancellation is “an act of stolen valor,” and that Biden is “turning millions of Americans into people who are engaged in stolen valor.”

Turning Point USA President Charlie Kirk (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4001299) used student debt cancellation to attack college education in general, claiming he might not be so opposed if colleges were “producing fruit that loved America.” Instead, he said, they’re the “Wuhan Institute of Virology equivalent of idea pathogens in our country” and asked, “Is this a alleged money laundering scheme to pay off colleges for their Marxist indoctrination?”

Kirk (https://mobile.twitter.com/charliekirk11/status/1630626934815338496) also wrote on Twitter that “college is a scam!”

yikes

https://www.mediamatters.org/ron-desantis/hungarys-viktor-orban-targeted-central-european-university-gov-ron-desantis-following

florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and anti-civil rights activist Christopher Rufo are waging a campaign against New College of Florida that strongly resembles actions taken by Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister Viktor Orbán in 2017 and 2018 to shut down Central European University.

DeSantis appointed (https://www.mediamatters.org/critical-race-theory/desantis-appoints-anti-civil-rights-activist-chris-rufo-new-college-florida) Rufo, known for his anti-Black and anti-LGBTQ messaging propaganda (https://www.mediamatters.org/diversity-discrimination/key-figure-behind-critical-race-theory-scare-campaign-admitted-he-doesnt), to the board of trustees at New College of Florida in early January. Since then, Rufo has engaged in what amounts to a hostile takeover (https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d37g3/ron-desantis-new-college-christopher-rufo) of the school, forcing the president out and attempting to reinvent the school as a conservative institution. The scheme echoes Orbán’s plot (https://www.npr.org/2018/12/06/674310948/american-university-ces-kicked-out-of-hungary-says-it-will-move-to-vienna) to force CEU out of Hungary just years earlier.

Right-wing media personalities and activists in the United States have extensively praised (https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/right-wing-media-spend-week-rallying-around-viktor-orban-after-he-gave-what-his-own) Orbán in recent years, including after he gave what his own adviser called (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/24/viktor-orban-against-race-mixing-europe-hungary) a “pure Nazi speech” in which he decried “race mixing” among Hungarians. During a May 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference event in Hungary, Orbán referred (https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/fox-news-host-tucker-carlson-has-dangerous-friend-hungarys-viktor-orban) to Fox News star Tucker Carlson as a “friend” whose show should be “broadcasted day and night.” (Carlson passionately defended (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3961356) Orbán in 2021, characterizing his views as “moderate and conventional.”) A separate event known as the National Conservatism Conference also served (https://news.yahoo.com/at-miami-conference-the-post-trump-populist-right-speaks-to-its-base-and-courts-donors-234405211.html) to strengthen the ties (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2022-election/american-rights-future-involves-waging-religious-battle-left-leaders-s-rcna48961) between the illiberal Hungarian leader and his stateside admirers.

Whether DeSantis and Rufo are deliberately modeling their efforts on Orbán’s — or the similarities have arisen naturally from the authoritarian ideologies all three men share — isn’t clear. Regardless, Rufo himself appeared to endorse (https://mobile.twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1498537335151017986) Orbán’s targeting of CEU in a tweet to conservative writer and Orbán fanboy (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/19/magazine/viktor-orban-rod-dreher.html) Rod Dreher.

[twts]

other members of DeSantis’ inner circle have praised Orbán’s administration. During the National Conservatism Conference in Miami last September,Christina Pushaw,a longtime DeSantis aide, “told the audience that Orbán’s government gave her inspiration” for icing out mainstream journalists, as reported (https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/10/how-to-make-a-semi-fascist-party.html) in New York magazine.

“The New Yorker wrote to Orbán and asked for comment on their hit piece, and they received a response that was just perfect. It said, ‘We are not going to participate in the validation process for liberal propaganda,’ ” she recounted, “and I don’t think we need to participate in that validation process either.” Instead, she noted, DeSantis gives access to conservative sites, which then get quotes and scooplets they can use to build their audience.

At the same conference, an Orbán adviser praised DeSantis and used the governor’s policies to justify and normalize Hungary’s own. From New York magazine:

At one panel, The Federalist’s Sean Davis asked Balázs Orbán, an adviser (no relation) to Viktor Orbán, how his government is preventing the fake-news media from poisoning the minds of the youth. “Just as is done in Florida,” Orbán replied, explaining that the Hungarian regime used state power to prevent the left from indoctrinating the country in its ideology. (His spokesperson explained that he was referring specifically to “gender propaganda.”) He mocked the idea that the regime was behaving autocratically: “You can say I am autocratic, pro-Putin, pro-everything that is bad, but look, in Florida, in the United States, the Republicans are doing the same.”

The similarities in the campaigns that DeSantis and Rufo in Florida, and Orbán in Hungary, have waged against a particular institution of higher learning are striking. Beginning in 2017, Orbán set his sights onCEU, one of Budapest’s top universities. Founded in 1991 by liberal philanthropist George Soros, who was born in Hungary, the school was meant to serve as a model of post-Cold War openness and cosmopolitanism. Orbán saw it as a threat — a bastion of liberalism that threatened his far-right regime.

Orbán, who studied law at István Bibó, a college in Budapest, moved to impose requirements on CEU that appeared to be impossible to meet by design. As The Atlantic reported (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/06/george-soros-viktor-orban-ceu/588070/):

Although the legislation didn’t mention CEU by name, the school was its obvious—and only—target. The bill would suddenly make CEU’s existence in the country dependent on quickly meeting a series of impossible-seeming requirements. As a foreign university, it would have to operate a campus in its country of origin. (CEU was chartered in the state of New York, but it didn’t have any faculty or facilities there.) Its national government would need to enter into a bilateral accreditation agreement with Hungary. (In the U.S., accreditation agreements are the jurisdiction of the states, not the federal government.)

The law passed, ultimately forcing CEU to close its campus and relocate (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/16/ceu-classes-move-to-vienna-orban-hungary-ousts-university) to Vienna, Austria.

Orbán’s broader intrusions into school curricula also anticipate DeSantis’ own attempts (https://www.mediamatters.org/ron-desantis/new-york-times-failing-its-coverage-desantis-radical-attacks-public-education) to exert control (https://www.mediamatters.org/ron-desantis/new-york-times-frames-anti-lgbtq-and-anti-black-educational-policies-question) over classroom instruction. The Atlantic writes:

Textbooks and curricula, once the domain of municipalities, have been centralized and now inculcate the regime’s politics. “The government is quite clear that patriotic education is as important as transferring knowledge,” Péter Kréko, the political analyst, told me. An eighth-grade history book praises Orbán as a “foundational figure.” A high-school textbook opens a section on “multiculturalism” with an image of refugees huddled at the Budapest train station, accompanied by a quotation from the prime minister: “We consider it a value that Hungary is a homogeneous country.”

Rufo has been alternately open and cryptic about his plans for New College. He sometimes describes his efforts almost modestly, as in a closing paragraph on his blog (https://www.city-journal.org/recapturing-higher-education) at City Journal:

My proposals include redesigning the curriculum to align with the classical model; abolishing DEI programs and replacing them with “equality, merit, and colorblindness” principles; adopting the Kalven statement on institutional neutrality; restructuring the administration and academic departments; recruiting new faculty with expertise in the classical liberal arts tradition; and establishing a graduate school for training teachers in classical education.

But in the same post, he endorsed DeSantis’ chief-of-staff’s comment that the goal is to remake New College into a “Hillsdale of the South,” referencing the far-right (https://www.salon.com/2022/03/15/how-this-tiny-christian-college-is-driving-the-rights-nationwide-against-public-schools/) Christian college (https://www.mediamatters.org/federalist/conservative-organizations-and-right-wing-media-are-using-anti-lgbtq-alarmism-stoke-fear) in Michigan.

As New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/09/opinion/chris-rufo-florida-ron-desantis.html) (emphasis in original):

The new majority’s plan, Rufo told me just after his appointment was announced, is to transform New College into a public version of Hillsdale. “We want to provide an alternative for conservative families in the state of Florida to say there is a public university that reflects your values,” he said.

Rufo has made clear that New College is just the beginning. “If we are successful, the effort can serve as a model for other states,” he wrote at City Journal.

Orbán was successful in driving CEU out of Hungary. Whether DeSantis and Rufo can remake New College remains to be seen, much less whether their actions are scalable. Regardless, Rufo has stated that his ambitions do not end with the DeSantis administration. In a recent video titled “The Strategy Behind the Campaign to Abolish DEI Bureaucracies in Public Universities” posted to his YouTube page, he (https://youtu.be/5BH8NSyi6OU) that his goal is to “get it done in one state, in the state of Florida, and then see a domino effect of other states following suit.”

But it would be wise to take warning from CEU’s president, Shalini Randeria.

“We are a textbook case because what we need to realise is that all of these ‘soft authoritarian’ regimes, as I call them, are learning from one another. There is a playbook they are carefully watching to see what works in one case or another,” she said in an interview (https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20221021143435473) with University World News. “We need to study this carefully to see there is a certain toolbox they’re using, and no university is safe.”

fox stepford mat'l

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-keeps-booking-pharmaceutical-heir-whose-mom-paid-specialist-deprogram-her-wokism

no lnx vid

Fox News keeps booking a pharmaceutical heir whose mom paid a specialist to “deprogram” her from “wokeism”

Mount Holyoke alum Annabella Rockwell works for conservative edutainment organization PragerU, which she credits with freeing her from liberal indoctrination

WRITTEN BY JOHN KNEFEL

PUBLISHED 11/29/22

A spectre is haunting college campuses — the spectre of wokeism. It is an ideology and a cult that separates children from parents, rendering each unknowable to the other. Misery and alienation: This is the goal of these indoctrination centers. But all is not lost. A small band of rebels stand in their way. They are the ragtag freedom fighters at PragerU.

That, at least, is the story the producers and talent at Fox News are telling their viewers.

Leading the charge for liberation is pharmaceutical heir and PragerU director of development for Palm Beach Annabella Rockwell, who can trace her lineage back to the Mayflower, thank you very much. Rockwell fell victim to the siren song of wokeism her first year at Mount Holyoke, a historically women’s college in Massachusetts.

“I studied history and politics at Mount Holyoke,” Rockwell said in a November 15 interview with her boss, Dennis Prager. “Every class was, you know, history, but history with race, history with gender.”

By the time Rockwell graduated in 2015, she was “totally indoctrinated,” she said in a recent interview with the New York Post. Her mom, Melinda, “enlisted the help of a deprogrammer who charged $300 a day as well as Annabella’s old tennis coach, Scott Williams,” to overcome her daughter’s “brainwashing.”

Rockwell had the support of her family’s personal fortune, but she needed something else: a light in the darkness. As she told Fox News’ top star and white nationalist Tucker Carlson on Monday evening, her salvation came at the hands of PragerU, where she now works, when one of its videos came up on a social media feed. This heartwarming story shows how PragerU funnels young people into reactionary politics – and just so happens to be a great branding opportunity to further spread that organization’s propaganda.

“I had to unlearn my four years of wokeism by watching five-minute PragerU videos online for free,” she said.

“Amazing,” Carlson responded. “It is a cult. Its aim is to separate you from the people who love you most.”

Video CitationFrom the November 28, 2022, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight

Teaching history without race or gender is obviously better, which is exactly the type of top-notch scholarship you can get from Prager and his absolutely real university.

Fox News’ Outnumbered analyzed Rockwell's hero’s journey on Monday afternoon, prior to her debut on Tucker Carlson Tonight. Co-host Emily Compagno, a paragon of intellectual rigor — who also knows more than a little about learning history without regard to race or gender — weighed in with the insight and precision that’s become her trademark.

College students are “being taught to hate their country; they’re also being taught to hate their families,” Compagno argued. “And that is step one of true indoctrination.”

Video CitationFrom the November 28, 2022, edition of Fox News' Outnumbered

But, like the totalitarian cult of wokeness itself, Rockwell wasn’t yet satisfied with her conquest. She pushed forward, appearing Tuesday morning on Fox & Friendsto share her tale of woe and redemption, explaining how she finally broke free of her ideological prison.

In 2020, at the height of what has been referred to as the largest protest movement in the history of the United States, Rockwell saw the light.

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VideoCitationFrom the November 29, 2022, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends

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}:

“It wasn't until seeing the riots happening that I realized, OK, this is so hypocritical. Like, why are we fighting for equality and empowerment by burning down people's [PVT PROPERTY = > HU RIGHTS] businesses?” Rockwell explained. “It just doesn't make sense to me.” (One way to make sense of the George Floyd uprisings is to study “history with race.”)

Rockwell closed out the interview with another plug for PragerU. Whatever else the organization’s shortcomings, it appears that marketing is not one of them.

mirror? real am do not belong in church? pinko prof recycled BS

an 922 david badash

Ron Johnson (https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/?s=Ron+Johnson) (R-WI) is angered Democratic voters are allowed to go to church, college, and be employed by those institutions and even the federal government, saying they have “infiltrated”these essential areas of American life and many others.

An elections and COVID conspiracy theory promotor, Senator Johnson, appearing on far-right-wing talk show host Mark Levin’s Sunday night Fox News show, declared, “what this entire election is about is fighting for freedom.”

It’s a common refrain for the Wisconsin Republican who infamously spent the Fourth of July in 2018 in Moscow, “posing for propaganda photos with Russian officials” as The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/eight-republicans-spent-july-4-in-russia-where-are-the-fireworks/2018/07/06/beae30be-812e-11e8-b658-4f4d2a1aeef1_story.html) noted at the time, while posting a tweet (https://twitter.com/SenRonJohnson/status/1014487741416042497) for his American constituents proclaiming, “What does July 4th mean to me? Freedom.”

READ MORE: ‘Putin’s Favorite Senator’ Ron Johnson Scorched for Claiming Dems Weakened Ukraine by Impeaching Trump: ‘FBI Warned You’ (https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2022/02/putins-favorite-senator-ron-johnson-scorched-for-claiming-dems-weakened-ukraine-by-impeaching-trump-fbi-warned-you/)

Milbank observed Johnson’s Moscow visit came on “the same day it was reported in Britain (https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/07/british-couple-poisoned-in-new-novichok-case-russia-again-denies-involvement/) that two more people had been poisoned by a Russian nerve agent British officials say came from Vladimir Putin’s regime. On the day after the Senate Intelligence Committeeaffirmed the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-cyber/senate-panel-backs-intelligence-agencies-on-russia-trump-conclusions-idUSKBN1JT2YB) that Russia interfered in the election to help Donald Trump.”

Johnson, facing a tight re-election race for a third term despite having promised to retire after his second (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/01/09/ron-johnson-reelection/), is running against Democratic Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes.

On Sunday Johnson suggested to Levin that liberals, Democrats, and anyone on “the left” as he put it, do not have an inherent right to participate in American life on an equal footing as Republicans.

And he accused Democrats of “infiltrating” American life four times.

READ MORE: ‘Wants to Steal Your Money’: Ron Johnson Thinks Rick Scott’s Social Security Plan Is ‘Not Cruel Enough’ Say Critics (https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2022/08/wants-to-steal-your-money-ron-johnson-thinks-ricks-scotts-social-security-plan-is-not-cruel-enough-say-critics/)

“The press is so unbelievably powerful and the left has infiltrated every institution of this country,” Johnson told Levin.

“They started with the college and university system. So they control college of education and journalism and law. And they’ve infiltrated every agency. They’ve infiltrated religions. They’ve infiltrated everything and now we’re seeing the results of that.”

“That’s why our nation is literally on a precipice. We’re at a hinge point in history,” Johnson declared.

“We have to win this election and we have to win many more because we’ve got to push them out of these institutions and return some normalcy, return the values that made this country great,” Johnson, echoing the trumpist mantra, concluded.

READ MORE: ‘Delusional Huckster,’ ‘Charlatan,’ ‘Political Grifter’ and a ‘Virus’: 100-Year Old Newspaper Destroys Ron Johnson (https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2022/01/delusional-huckster-charlatan-political-grifter-and-a-virus-100-year-old-newspaper-destroys-ron-johnson/)

While there is little public polling, the last four polls (https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2022/senate/wi/wisconsin_senate_johnson_vs_barnes-7758.html#polls) show Barnes up over Johnson by an average of 4.3 points.

Saying it “could be one of the uglier races of 2022,” Politico (https://www.politico.com/2022-election/race-forecasts-ratings-and-predictions/wisconsin/senate/) lists it as a “tossup.” As of Monday FiveThirtyEight (https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2022-election-forecast/senate/wisconsin/) puts the Johnson vote ahead of Barnes by 0.2 percentage points.

Watch below or at this link (https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2022/09/infiltrated-senator-angered-democrats-allowed-to-go-to-college-and-church-work-in-government-agencies-video/).

mma 6 22

sTEVE DOOCY(CO-HOST): Battle for the American Mind, Uprooting a Century of Miseducation, a brand new book that hits the shelves today. In it, Pete Hegseth and David Goodwin discuss how American education has been destroyed and what we can do to restore it. Here's an excerpt. "Make no mistake about it the historical singularity that was America's founding was a result of classical Christian education. Full stop. Our founders did not stumble their way to brilliance of 1776. They were forged in the foundry of the education of their time." And Pete and David join us live right now. And they've got the number one book in the world. Who's who?

PETE HEGSETH (AUTHOR, FOX AND FRIENDS WEEKEND CO-HOST): Pete. David.

DOOCY: Thank you very much. David, it's very nice to meet you. We were talking to Pete about this yesterday. This is part of a master plan that a lot of people don't have any idea has been going on for decades.

DAVID GOODWIN (AUTHOR): Right.

DOOCY: Regarding education in the country.

GOODWIN: Yes. Well, you know, that's when I was doing the research, some of the research through the original book, which The New Republic in the early part of the 20th century. I thought I would find a lot about labor unions and a lot about minimum wage, a lot about, you know, the things that we know that the progressives were talking about at the time. But education was in every issue. And I was wondering, why.

DOOCY: Right. And Pete who would –who drew up this master plan?

HEGSETH: Well, there were a lot of – there wasn't one master architect, John Dewey's the father of the progressive educational system.

DOOCY: But they were like-minded.

HEGSETH: Very like-minded. Almost all atheists. Almost all socialists. Eventually, almost all Marxists.And they had a plan to capture the minds of our youngest kids. And we're not talking about the lunacy of higher education. This is K through 12. They knew the affections of young people. Elementary school students would shape the way they view America, their faith, for the rest of their life. And so they set it out on a course. They didn't know exactly where it would lead, Steve. All of these architects of progressives, but they knew where it wouldn't lead: Not toward Biblical wisdom, not toward appreciation for our founding documents.And people say to David I all the time, How do I not know this history?

DOOCY: Right.

HEGSETH: 100-year history. You know why? Because the progressives write the history. They write the textbooks.

DOOCY: Right.

HEGSETH: So, David and I had to dig underneath everything that's hidden to find out the real story of how they captured K through 12.

DOOCY: You know, and David, we've known for a long time that America's colleges, for the most part. are way to the left, very progressive. But I don't think a lot of people realized until the last decade or so when they started looking in America'stextbooks,how far to the left aome are trying to drag K through 12.

GOODWIN: Well, they've had the advantage. When you have the college system, you control the instruments of education all the way down to the kindergarten. Right. Because you train the teachers, you train the administrators, you train the curriculum providers. You're the ones doing the accreditation, the college – at the college level. All of that flows right from the, you know, kind of nodes of control that the progressives had.

DOOCY: And, you know Pete, so many parents got a good look at what their kids were doing during COVID-19. Your first chapter is our COVID 1619 moment.

HEGSETH: It's exactly right. You're at home looking at your kid's curriculum through your laptop, and suddenly there's a new founding date on their screen, 1619 or they're talking about gender pronouns for seven or eight-year-olds.[note no eg]  So we start with the problem, and the first step to any recovery is understanding the depth of your problem. And we outline that. But the best part of the book, in our opinion is those five chapters at the end that are about the solution. AndDavid runs the Association of Classical Christian Schools.

DOOCY: Right.

HEGSETH: Classical Christian Dot Org. There are hundreds of wonderful brick-and-mortar schools across the country that are the exact opposite of what our government schools provide right now. There are online options, there arehomeschoolcurriculum options. The insurgency to take our classroom back has begun, and that's the preferred form of ideological warfare of the weak against the small. You do not have to default to progressive public schools, because otherwise, you're going to war with an educational complex that has 40 hours a week to capture your kid's mind. And that's why we call it a battle. It really is for parents and grandparents.

aha of course goes back to powell memo but right constant cries of victimhood, oppressed by big tech, big gubmint etc etc etc etc

but recall they have to explain why they fail to win the the much vaunted marketplace of idea / polls

sinecure?

11 21 no lnx

'Thought criminals': Aggrieved conservative elites announce new university dedicated to 'truth' — but who’s funding Ii?

David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement November 08, 2021

Bari Weiss. Andrew Sullivan. Jonathan Rauch. Larry Summers.

Those are some of the more recognizable names a new university launched Monday lists on the front page of its website.

Its founder says some of them have been "treated like thought criminals."

The University of Austin (which sounds remarkably like The University of Texas at Austin, founded in 1883,) in an announcement says it is "dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth." It is not currently accredited and offers no degrees.

But some of the people it is attracting have highly-controversial backgrounds. Indeed, some, like Weiss and Sullivan, seem to thrive on creating controversy.

It's clear, from its founder's message, that this is an enterprise dedicated to protect those who use their huge platforms to decry being "canceled."

"Nearly a quarter of American academics in the social sciences or humanities endorse ousting a colleague for having a wrong opinion about hot-button issues such as immigration or gender differences,"Pano Kanelos, the former president of St. John's University and apparently the founder of The University of Austin, writes Monday at Bari Weiss' Substack. "Over a third of conservative academics and PhD students say they had been threatened with disciplinary action for their views. Four out of five American PhD students are willing to discriminate against right-leaning scholars, according to a report by the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology."

Kanelos discusses some of the University's founding faculty – a prerequisite appears to be having been subjected to criticism.

"On our quads, faculty are being treated like thought criminals. Dorian Abbot, a University of Chicago scientist who has objected to aspects of affirmative action, was recently disinvited from delivering a prominent public lecture on planetary climate at MIT. Peter Boghossian, a philosophy professor at Portland State University, finally quit in September after years of harassment by faculty and administrators. Kathleen Stock, a professor at University of Sussex, just resigned after mobs threatened her over her research on sex and gender."

Its FAQ answers the question "Why Austin?" by jokingly replying: "If it's good enough for Elon Musk and Joe Rogan, it's good enough for us."

The big question of course is who is funding this endeavor? The "University" says it will have a physical campus.

That's expensive, as is paying top names.

"We have secured the seed money necessary to launch the university. But we are in the process of securing $250 million, which will enable us to grow into a comprehensive university," it says.

"UATX has requested and is awaiting a tax-exempt determination from the IRS. At present, UATX is fiscally sponsored by Cicero Research, a tax-exempt entity organized under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code."

An online search for "Cicero Research" nets almost nothing, except a one page listing on Cause IQ, a company to help nonprofits grow.

According to that filing for the year ending December 2020, Cicero Research has no full-time employees, no assets, but under "characteristics" is tagged "political advocacy."

Who's actually funding this is currently unknown.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/fox-news-fascism/

Since well before Donald Trump's election, Fox News has served (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/19/fox-news-big-lie-segments-face-judicial-comeuppance/) as one of his movement's most powerful and effective propaganda outlets. In numerous ways both large and small, Fox News has mainstreamed fascist and authoritarian talking points, circulated Trump's thousands of lies and massaged, minimized or falsified the events of Jan. 6 and the ongoing coup against American democracy.

On a near-daily basis, Tucker Carlson and other Fox News hosts amplify white supremacist lies about the "Great Replacement"— even if they don't use that precise term — claiming that white people are the victims of a genocidal plot to "replace" them with nonwhites. New public opinion research shows that this type of white supremacist stochastic terrorism (https://www.salon.com/2021/08/03/republicans-are-increasingly-ready-for-violence-we-look-away-at-our-peril/) has been internalized by tens of millions of white Americans — specifically white Republican and Trump voters — to such an extreme that many of them are willing to condone or participate in acts of political violence in to overthrow Joe Biden's presidency (https://www.salon.com/2021/10/01/terror-millions-of-americans-say-theyd-support-violence-to-restore-to-power/) and American democracy.[when do we get to use the guns, corp medical tyrrany? "]

More than 700,000 people have died in the United States from the coronavirus pandemic -- and this is a low estimate. More than a million Americans are expected to die before the virus is brought fully under control.

Public health experts have documented the direct role that Fox News and other right-wing media have played (https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/4/22/21229360/coronavirus-covid-19-fox-news-sean-hannity-misinformation-death) in encouraging their audience to not be vaccinated against the coronavirus. This is part of a much larger pattern of behavior, in which Fox News hasconsistently fueled and amplified coronavirus denialism (https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/06/25/fox-news-hannity-coronavirus-misinformation/). In total, Fox "News" has been a public health threat (https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/the-data-is-in-fox-news-may-have-kept-millions-from-taking-the-coronavirus-threat-seriously/2020/06/26/60d88aa2-b7c3-11ea-a8da-693df3d7674a_story.html), and bears both direct and indirect responsibility (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/27/briefing/covid-red-states-vaccinations.html) for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Because Fox News has such pernicious influence control over its public (https://www.npr.org/local/309/2020/05/04/849109486/study-finds-more-c-o-v-i-d-19-cases-among-viewers-of-fox-news-host-who-downplayed-pandemic) that it has caused discord, chaos and other forms of dysfunction — almost certainly including interpersonal violence — within families, among friends and across entire communities. When and if American democracy finally succumbs to authoritarianism, its obituary should include Fox News for helping to kill it.

For almost a decade, Jen Senko has been documenting the personal impact of Fox News on the American people. In her 2015 documentary "The Brainwashing of My Dad," she showed in painstaking detail, how Fox News and the right-wing propaganda machine transformed her father into an angry, paranoid, bigoted, political extremist. Her father is only one of the millions of Americans who have fallen under the spell of Fox News and the right-wing hate machine — and by doing so became the base of support for Republican fascist movement.

In her new book, also called "The Brainwashing of My Dad (https://bookshop.org/a/2464/9781728239590)," Senko continues to explore the damaging influence of Fox News and the larger right-wing echo chamber in America's worsening democracy crisis.

In this conversation, Senko details how Fox News functions like a type of cult that uses anger and fear to seduce and control its audience. She also explains how right-wing media creates an alternate universe that offers meaning, community and friendship for the confused, alienated and lonely people — predominantly older white men — who are its primary audience. Senko shares more personal anecdotes about how Fox News and its allied media have destroyed loving relationships,. She also warns that Fox News is priming its audience for political violence to support Donald Trump and the Republican-fascist ongoing coup attempt.

With your documentary, you tried to warn the American people that Fox News and the right-wing media are an extreme danger to the country. But here we are several years later, with America's democracy crisis continuing to escalate as the right has increasingly embraced fascism. How do you feel watching this disaster?

Right now, I'm very, very frustrated. When I made the documentary, I was naïve. I thought to myself, "I'm going to save the world. I'm going to save America." It was cathartic for me to make "The Brainwashing of My Dad."

Now the American people are like the frog in the boiling water. It was lukewarm at first, nice and comfy, and they were all just splashing around a little bit. Then the water gets hotter, and they don't notice. By the time they notice, it's too late and they're boiling.

Given all that has happened and is happening with Trump and the Republicans, my feelings are now panic and despair. I always still have a seed of hope. There are many more people now who did get the message that I was trying to explain about Fox News and where the country was headed. I also have hope because it seems that more Americans are organized to resist.

What do people outside Trump World and the MAGAverse — or who are just generally in denial about the existential threat the country is facing — not understand about what's happening?

Too many people still do not seem to get that what the Republicans and Trump are doing to undermine democracy was long in the planning. It is all like an octopus and it has many tentacles. The head of the octopus is the media.

As fast as perhaps the FBI can catch those who are working to betray the country and commit treason, Fox News is everywhere. There truly is a vast right-wing conspiracy, as Hillary Clinton described it back in the 1990s. This is true whether you like it or not.

Basically, a bunch of oligarchs, evangelicals, racists, mega-corporations and right-wing libertarians got together and planned how they could get rid of government and any policies that serve the public good. What they want is no public schools, no libraries, no post office, no Social Security, no public health option. These right-wing forces want privatization across the board so that they can make as much money as they want, unrestrained, and won't have to pay taxes. Then these same forces got control of the media, and could inject their message right into the public's collective mind.

This right-wing movement also did other things too, such as running for school boards and in other local elections. They used gerrymandering and created a panic about nonexistent voter fraud. But it is the right-wing media that drives the campaign. What shocks me the most is that most Americans still do not understand the big picture.

In your documentary, you showed in painful detail how Fox News and the right-wing machine literally changed your father's personality into a person you no longer recognized. Other Americans have experienced this — perhaps millions of them. What is your dad an example of? How do we understand what Fox News and the right-wing echo chamber did to him as representative of a much larger phenomenon?

My father was seduced by the anger and the excitement. People know that something's wrong, that the system is rigged somehow, but they don't give much thought to how. My father was also retiring from his job, and he found the right-wing media. This gave him something to occupy his mind and thoughts.

Now, suddenly, there's all this excitement in his life. There is some right-wing media person telling him that the government is in his personal business too much. There are very persuasive big personalities pushing my father's buttons and those of the audience in general. And you know what? That feels good. There is an addictive quality to anger like that. It was exciting for my father. It also provided him a group to belong to.

I believe that a lot of white men feel like, "Well, what am I supposed to do? And who am I?" They needed help in figuring themselves out, and the right-wing media and that world provided it. Too many such men developed a victim mentality, telling themselves, "I'm a victim, I'm mad, I've always wanted to fight back."

How was Fox News and the right-wing media machine able to take people such as your father and get them to a point where they would support a coup or political terrorism or conspiracy theories like QAnon? Were they always prone to such behavior or did Fox News and the right-wing machine make them that way?

On Twitter, a lot people will say to me, usually Democrats or liberals, "Oh, these people, they were always like that. They're just finding a port to park their boat in now." I do not believe that is necessarily true.

My dad hadn't been racist. He hadn't been anti-"illegal immigrant." After listening to Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, he got brainwashed. When I made the documentary, I did not know if I believed in brainwashing. Now I know that brainwashing does exist, it is real.

There's the brainwashing that happens through force, what we were all familiar with from movies. But what Fox News and the larger right-wing are doing is brainwashing by stealth. I believe this to be more insidious. There's only one type of information going into the brain. There's isolation. There is repetition. That is how they brainwash their public.

I feel like there has been a massive brainwashing campaign, something unlike anything we've ever seen before in this country. That's what's happened in America through Fox News and the right-wing media and movement.

Through your website and other outreach, many people have contacted you about how Fox News and the right-wing media machine have impacted their relationships. What are some of the common themes you are seeing?

One of them is anger. The relative, the loved one, the friend, whoever it may be, suddenly is angry more and more, it's their predominant mood. These people also become very argumentative. Many of these people who are watching Fox and are part of the right-wing echo chamber are incapable of having conversations that somehow do not turn to politics. They become obsessed with this new right-wing way of thinking. It becomes the person's mission. It is all of who they are.

What are some personal stories that jump out at you?

A woman recently shared with me how her husband was a good, sweet guy and a really quiet person. Right before Trump ran for office and became president, he started watching Fox News and his personality completely changed. He would yell at her and their child more. He would criticize her, his wife, because she was a Democrat, yell at her, yell at her kid, start criticizing her. The husband was becoming emotionally abusive.

The woman who reached out to me was afraid that it was going to traumatize her child and that she might have to leave her husband. She was really sad about it because she had once been very much in love with him.

Another person who contacted me lost several members of her family to COVID. Her father still wouldn't get the vaccine. He got COVID, and still wouldn't get the vaccine — or said he wouldn't — and he died because Tucker Carlson and other people on Fox News were telling people like him not to get vaccinated.

What is going on, emotionally and cognitively, where someone would listen to a person on TV who is telling them to do things that will cause them personal harm, that will hurt their family members, friends and other people they care about?

They're not thinking rationally. The part of their brain called the amygdala has been hijacked. That is the fight-or-flight part of the brain. When it is activated, the cerebral cortex is not functioning 100 percent. These people are responding from panic. In that moment, they go to the source that they have learned to trust. That source, in this case Fox News, is telling them, "You can only trust us." That source is angry all the time. It tells its public that the government has screwed them over and the politicians that have screwed them over. The response to Fox News and the right-wing machine actually becomes something physiological.

How does Fox News make friends with its viewers? Because what Fox News and other right-wing propaganda outlets are doing on a fundamental level is establishing an intimate relationship with their public.

There is a feeling that there is an in-group and an out-group. Fox and other parts of the right-wing media make their audience feel special, like they are in on something special. It is a very seductive feeling. Being part of a tribe makes people feel safer. That dynamic is also an example of groupthink.

Many Fox viewers and people who consume that right-wing media just want to belong to the group, to think the same way as everyone else in the group. You trust your people. You don't want to doubt them. They are your friends.

Are the people who watch Fox News awake, or are they asleep?

I think they're in a trance. They are definitely not awake. They're almost on autopilot. They are going to accept anything they are told by Fox.

Why would anyone listen to Fox News, or the right-wing echo chamber more generally, telling them to hurt people, to engage in violence? Why would a formerly reasonable person listen to these commands? What has gone wrong with them?

Because they are in such a rage. They are primed to take that next step. They're in such a rage because they believe, in their heart of hearts, that the 2020 election was stolen away from Trump. They really believe that their country is being taken over illegitimately.

Mix that in with the rage that they already have, where for example they truly believe, "Democrats are horrible, they're the devil's spawn. Anything that's wrong in my life is because of them. Now they're stealing the election, they stole my guy who speaks to me, who's like me." They're just ready to fight.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/tech-billionaire-peter-thiel-warns-against-socialism-plans-to-endorse-trump-in-2020

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FOX NATIONPublished September 19, 2019

Tech billionaire Peter Thiel warns against socialism, plans to endorse Trump in 2020

By Yael Halon | Fox News

Get Fox Nation

Tech visionary Peter Thiel warns against socialism, plans to endorse Trump in 2020

Tech visionary Peter Thiel warns against socialism, plans to endorse Trump in 2020

In a new episode of "Uncommon Knowledge," available now on Fox Nation, billionaire Silicon Valley investor and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel sat down with author Peter Robinson to discuss everything from his disdain for politics and the 2020 election, to his thoughts on education and its role in society today.

Commenting on a recent essay he authored in which he referred to politics as a divisive "field of battle," Thiel reiterated his message, calling the political process "deeply adversarial."

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Fox Nation is an entertaining streaming service featuring your favorite Fox News personalities, with original shows and documentaries that celebrate America.

PETER THIEL: SILICON VALLEY CLUELESS ABOUT PATRIOTISM TODAY

"I would like us to be honest about how terrible politics is," he said. "As someone who is generally libertarian, I would like to live in a world that is less conflict, less politics."

Peter Thiel accuses Google of working with China, not US militaryVideo

"I think we must always resist this naive form of politics," Thiel continued, "that politics is just this mechanistic process where we take a poll and we get to some syrupy answer that everyone can agree with...that's not what politics is about at all," he said.

With that said, Thiel plans to endorse Trump in 2020, he explained, and issued particular warnings against 2020 Democrats Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders — both of whom are running on a socialist platform.

EXCLUSIVE: PETER THIEL TALKS TO TUCKER CARLSON

"I think the president will get reelected...but the socialists are not to be underestimated," saidThiel, expressing concern over low-interest rates that could potentially lead to a "redistribution of capital."

"It doesn't mean that zero percent interest rates lead directly to socialism, but I find the rates alarming as low as they are," he said.

Later in the segment, Thiel shared his perspective on education, encouraging students to drop out of college to pursue a career in science and tech-related industries.

In 2010, the billionaire launched the Thiel Fellowship, offering gifted students a total of $100,000 over two years, as well as guidance and other resources, to drop out of school and pursue other work — such as scientific research, creating a startup, or developing a social movement.

The fellowship's motto: "Some ideas can't wait."

Peter Thiel calls for top universities to lose non-profit status Video

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Asked what advice he'd give to students starting out, Thiel encouraged them to put less of an emphasis on education and "really focus more on the future."

"The reasonable advice I would give my former self 30 years ago would be to think a lot harder about the future. Don't think of education as a substitute to the future — try to think concretely about what you want to do," he said.

To hear Thiel's full remarks, including his perspective on artifical intelligence, religion, philosophy and more, join Fox Nation and watch the full episode of "Uncommon Knowledge," available today.

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP FOR A FOX NATION FREE TRIAL

Fox Nation programs are viewable on-demand and from your mobile device app, but only available only for Fox Nation subscribers. Go to Fox Nation to start a free trial and watch the extensive library from Tomi Lahren, Pete Hegseth, Abby Hornacek, Laura Ingraham, Greg Gutfeld, Judge Andrew Napolitano and many more of your favorite Fox News personalities.

Yael Halon is a reporter for Fox News.

Fox Nation

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==

the fed wacko blog

https://thefederalist.com/2020/08/13/new-paper-confirms-just-how-rigged-higher-education-is-against-the-right/

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https://policyexchange.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Academic-freedom-in-the-UK.pdf

new Paper Confirms Just How Rigged Higher Education Is Against The Right

A devastating new policy report provides data on how conservatives are sidelined in western academia. Now, conservatives have to decide what to do about it.

Sumantra MaitraBy Sumantra Maitra

AUGUST 13, 2020

A U.K. report finds that academia is severely damaged, has become a revolutionary institution within narrow and stifling ideological echo-chamber, and cannot be easily fixed with a simple “self-correction” pushed by market forces. Given how much the game is already rigged, legislation and other external interventions are needed to balance the scale.

The policy paper from Policy Exchange, a London-based think-tank, highlights the major trends in British higher-ed and has implications for similar problems in the United States. The report indicates that, compared to the 1960s when the British higher-ed system was divided between around 35 percent supporting Conservative causes and around 50 percent supporting the Labour Party, academia currently is almost wholly skewed to the left.

Conservative professoriate numbers are often in single digits. In the United States, also, several studies have found results similar to those of a 2018 survey, which found ten times as many Democrat-affiliated professors than Republican-affiliated at the top 60-ranked campuses. Worse, the U.K. paper finds, is that “soft totalitarianism” has increased, ranging fromacademic bullying and campaigns against scholars with unconventional views, to even outright seclusion in certain fields and disciplines.

About only half of academics would feel comfortable sitting next to someone who supported Britain’s right to leave the European Union, for example. Just 37 percent say they would feel comfortable being around someone critical of gender and trans-rights. One-third of academics would not hire a “Vote-Leave” supporter of Brexit.

The report also finds that active discrimination against conservatives happens in hiring, background checks, grant and scholarship applications, and committee memberships. Needless to mention, this is ideological discrimination in its purest form.

Naturally, it has resulted from institutions turning into a leftist fantasy world detached from reality. “Many academics thus choose to self-censor. This is again most marked for those who identify as ‘fairly right’ or ‘right’, 32 percent of whom have refrained from airing views in teaching and research,” the paper concludes.

Professor Matthew Goodwin, author of the best-selling National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy, wrote about the report and gave an example of how conservatives are ostracized in academia. Conservative or nationalist professors not only face massive abuse on social media but also are sidelined in their careers solely for their political views. In real life, writes Goodwin, this means:

…being disinvited from workshops in my core research area;  being asked about my personal political views during interviews for research grants; being asked to account for inviting a conservative onto campus; being accused of ‘going native’ or being an ‘apologist’ for Brexiteers and populists; being made aware that I was considered ‘problematic’; and, more generally, experiencing social ‘distancing’ from colleagues.

Naturally, senior and established academics can better weather such abuse, but junior academics are often sidelined or censored severely. Almost worse, many resort to self-censorship in an effort to preserve their career prospects.

The report argues that legislation is critically important to address issues of balance, establish positions to monitor academic freedom, and make sure that universities address freedom of speech and actual viewpoint diversity, rather than accumulating men and women who look different outwardly but all share the same ideas internally.

The report is important as it provides direct evidence for what most conservatives know to be instinctively true. Some of these issues are exactly similar in the United States, where campus free speech has been an increasingly partisan issue with conservatives trying to restore some semblance of equality in an atmosphere hostile to their views.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education maintains a whole database of how many times speakers have been disinvited on campuses. The University of Chicago is the only major university that has charted principles to defend free speech and freedom of expression on campus. So, while there have been many efforts by university leftists to shore up ethnic and racial diversity, the only diversity that is not visible is one of viewpoint.

Across the Anglosphere, three key issues ail academia. One, since ideological bias skews results, grants and scholarships are not falling sway to normal market conditions. Unfortunately, in this regard, despite much conventional conservative faith in markets, the market alone will not remedy what is wrong with academia. In fact, flawed as the current conditions are, a purely market “solution” would further treat students as consumers, encouraging them to feel even more entitled to whatever they desire from higher education.

Two, experience and history tell us that bureaucracy will do whatever is needed to survive and expand. University bureaucracy is no different and caters more to these entitled groups while expanding and filling their ranks. During the last three decades, administrative growth at universities has eclipsed 200 percent, compared to faculty growth in double digits.

Finally, add to these a very minor but extremely vocal group of activists acting as an ideological vanguard trying to discredit and ostracize opponents and grab power. Combined, these three create a perfect storm.

To defund activists in academia, and to ensure viewpoint diversity, external intervention is needed to enforce appropriate legislation and establish rules. South Dakota‘s new law on campus free speech and viewpoint diversity for public universities is a good model.

Assuredly, there are limits to whether governments can or should intervene. Governments can, however, reset the playground rules. They can, and should, help make universities better and more competitive while ensuring free-speech and viewpoint diversity and a level playing field. If it needs to be a battle of ideas, ideas need to openly compete with each other, without fear of ostracism or overt bullying.

Sumantra Maitra is a doctoral researcher at the University of Nottingham, UK, and a senior contributor to The Federalist. His research is in great power-politics and neorealism. You can find him on Twitter @MrMaitra.

tags:

academic bias academic debate academic freedom Bureaucracy campus activism campus administrators Campus Reform education freedom self-censorship viewpoint discrimination viewpoint diversity

==

ref hr1087

https://sdlegislature.gov/docs/legsession/2019/Bills/HB1087ENR.pdf

https://www.thecollegefix.com/south-dakota-legislature-passes-intellectual-diversity-bill/

The College Fix

Original. Student reported. Your daily dose of Right-minded news and commentary from across the nation

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:{:{Author Discussion on the President and the Media (https://www.c-span.org/video/?468104-6/author-discussion-president-media)Author and ABC News chief legal analyst Dan Abrams; Los Angeles Times…}::{}:

https://www.c-span.org/video/?468104-6/author-discussion-president-media

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liberal profs and media sauter

JANUARY 30, 2020

Author Discussion on the President and the Media

Author and ABC News (https://www.c-span.org/organization/?51557/ABC-News) chief legal analyst Dan Abrams; Los Angeles Times executive editor Norman Pearlstine; and former Fox and CBS News (https://www.c-span.org/organization/?51741/CBS-News) president Van Gordon Sauter (https://www.c-span.org/person/?vansauter)examined the relationship between the executive branch and the media.

}:

=

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/03/30/politics (https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/03/30/politics)

...American professors are overwhelmingly liberal, according to a new report (http://www.bepress.com/forum/vol3/iss1/art2/) on faculty political attitudes.

Previous surveys have reached similar conclusions, but this one suggests that the ideological divide on campuses may be greater than has previously been thought. And the authors of this survey say that their evidence suggests say that conservatives, practicing Christians and women are less likely than others to get faculty jobs at top colleges.

The research, published in The Forum, (http://www.bepress.com/forum/) is being praised as path-breaking by some scholars and as garbage by others. But since the study is being released at a time of heightened debate over charges of classroom bias, the report is likely to be closely examined and critiqued.

The findings are based on a survey of 1,643 faculty members at 183 four-year colleges and universities, and the results were analyzed by three political scientists: StanleyRothman of Smith College, S. Robert Lichter of George Mason University and Neil Nevitte of the University of Toronto. In the abstract to their report, they say that the research "suggests that complaints of ideologically based discrimination in academic advancement deserve serious consideration and further study."

Rosemary G. Feal, executive director of the Modern Language Association, said that the implication that liberal faculty members were keeping conservative scholars out was "rubbish," and said that anyone who has been on dozens of search committees, as she has, knows that. "It boggles my mind the degree to which this is rubbish."

The Findings

Faculty members in the study were asked to place themselves on the political spectrum, and 72 percent identified as liberal while only 15 percent identified as conservative, with the remainder in the middle. The professors were also asked about party affiliation, and here the breakdown was 50 percent Democrats, 11 percent Republicans, and the rest independent and third parties.

The study also broke down the findings by academic discipline, and found that humanities faculty members were the most likely (81 percent) to be liberal. The liberal percentage was at its highest in English literature (88 percent), followed by performing arts and psychology (both 84 percent), fine arts (83 percent), political science (81 percent).

Other fields have more balance. The liberal-conservative split is 61-29 in education, 55-39 in economics, 53-47 in nursing, 51-19 in engineering, and 49-39 in business.

Beyond general political identification, the professors were asked for views on specific issues, and here too, the authors find faculty backing for positions associated with liberal politics. Of professors, 84 percent somewhat or strongly agree that women should have the right to have abortions, and88 percent agree that policies should favor environmental protection even if those policies result in higher prices and fewer jobs.

The report's authors say that their findings suggest a "sharp shift to the left" from earlier studies, which found more ideological balance. But in fact numerous studies have made similar findings (although in many cases less detailed) in recent years.

"The American College Teacher" is a major study by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles that features some questions on politics. The last survey, in 2001, found that 5.3 percent of faculty members were far left, 42.3 percent were liberal, 34.3 percent were middle of the road, 17.7 percent were conservative, and 0.3 percent were far right. Those figures are only marginally different from the previous survey, in 1998.

Unlike the survey released this week, the UCLA survey includes faculty members at community colleges, and those faculty members are more evenly split than their four-year counterparts, with 33.3 percent identifying as liberal, 41.1 percent as middle of the road, and 22 percent as conservative.

The new study published in The Forum also attempts to look at the impact of the ideological split on college faculties.

So the authors devised an "academic achievement index" of  faculty members by looking at such factors as books written, journal articles and service on editorial boards. Then the authors looked at certain factors, such as political views, whether someone was religious (defined as attending services "at least once or twice a month"), and gender. The authors then tracked where scholars ended up to see whether there was a relationship between various factors in their backgrounds and whether they ended up at top colleges.

The authors report that among scholars with equivalent academic achievements, liberals are more likely than conservatives to be at top colleges. The scholars also found a negative correlation for being a practicing Christian to getting positions at top colleges (but not for observant Jews) and for women.

In the conclusion to the report, the authors acknowledge that their findings on possible discrimination against conservatives, Christians and women are "preliminary." But they go on to say that "these results suggest that conservative complaints of the presence and effects of liberal homogeneity in academia deserve to be taken seriously, despite their self-interested quality and the anecdotal nature of the evidence previously presented."

What It All Means

Stephen H. Balch, president of the National Association of Scholars, said that "the big news here is the first social science confirmation of the existence of discrimination in hiring and the personnel process." While previous studies have demonstrated the breadth of liberal support in the academy, he said, they have not made as direct a link to hiring and advancement.

Balch said there is now "very strong evidence" that there is bias in the hiring process against conservatives, whereas before this study, there was just "an enormous amount of anecdotal evidence."

College faculty members and presidents, "given their interest in diversity of all other kinds, and their professed desire to overcome discrimination, need to grapple with this."

Many academic leaders, however, say that the lopsided political identification totals are entirely predictable, and do not indicate discrimination of any kind. Feal, the MLA executive director, said that when humanities professors say that they are liberals, "the majority of us understand it to be not a narrow political ideology, but a conception of the world."

"We profess the liberal arts," she said. "That comes from freedom that we hold as a high value, from the pursuit of the truth, the pursuit of academic freedom, the belief that the learning and teaching of values will make us better citizens."

Prior to coming to the MLA, Feal was a professor and department chair  in modern languages at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and she says that searches never focused on questions of religion or politics. "These things are irrelevant in a search."

"When all was said and done, we had conservative Christians, we had liberal atheists, we had everyone," Feal said.

The study is part of a broader campaign, she said, to question the qualifications and rights of faculty members, especially in the humanities. "This is such a dangerous moment," she said. "We are facing the kind of scrutiny on politics and religion that truly signals danger."

Cary Nelson, author of Manifesto of a Tenured Radical, (http://www.nyupress.org/product_info.php?cPath=12&products_id=547) said that he wasn't surprised that some disciplines were largely liberal. Nelson, an English professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said that in his field, "which has devoted itself significantly to expanding the canon over the last 25 years, it's most likely that the people who are coming into the disciplines are going to have a liberal sentiment rather than a reactionary sentiment."

Nelson said, however, that even if most professors in some fields are liberal, you wouldn't know it from what goes on in classrooms, where he said most scholars are "bloody cowards about letting their politics out." Nelson said that he always tells his students that he is a liberal, and that conservative students will do well in his class as long as they speak up and challenge him.

When it comes to hiring, he says that some departments do engage in "PC hiring," which he defined as the kind of hiring "where a search committee will say, 'We need more women so we're going to give this slot to a woman' or 'We don't have enough gay people so we've got to hire a gay person.' " Nelson said this kind of hiring was wrong -- and foolish in the humanities -- where there is enough diversity in the total pool that "if you go for the very best people, you'll still end up with diversity."

In his department, he said, hiring is quality based, and even though many of his colleagues focus on issues of race and gender, "we hire people who work only on traditional authors, most of whom are dead white men." The question in hiring, he says, is are you excited by a person's work and its potential, not do you agree with it.

In the Minority

Not all scholars accept the premise that the ideological split is necessarily hurting higher education -- or at least not in a black-and-white way.

...

cited by FIRE boys:

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/la-op-shermer-lukianoff14apr14-story.html

Marxist professors or sensitive students?

Today, Shermer and Lukianoffweigh allegations of widespread political bias at American colleges. Later in the week, they'll debate ideological diversity in curricula, lifetime tenure for professors and more.

Faculty bias, by the numbers

By Michael Shermer

Students should complain about professorial indoctrination, because it is real and it is loaded heavily on the left, most notably in the social sciences and the humanities.

A 2005 study by George Mason University economist Daniel Klein found that Democrats outnumbered Republicans among the faculty by a staggering ratio of nearly 10 to 1 at UC Berkeley and 7.6 to 1 at Stanford. Measuring political attitudes through voter registration among faculty in 20 different departments, in the humanities and social sciences the ratio was 16 to 1 at both campuses (30 to 1 among assistant and associate professors), and in some departments, such as anthropology and journalism, there wasn't a single Republican to be found.

Another 2005 study by Stanley Rothman, S. Robert Lichter and Neil Nevitte discovered that only 15% of those teaching at American colleges and universities describe themselves as conservative, while 72% said they were liberal. That figure climbed to 80% in departments such as English literature, philosophy, political science and religious studies, with only 5% labeling themselves as conservative.

The bias exists even in law schools. In a 2005 article in the Georgetown Law Journal, Northwestern University law Professor John McGinnis reviewed the faculties of the top 21 law schools rated by the 2002 U.S. News & World Report graduate school rankings. He found that politically active professors at these top law schools overwhelmingly tend to be Democrats -- 81% contributed "wholly or predominantly" to Democratic campaigns while just 15% did the same for Republicans.

Given this reality, is it any wonder the academy has the reputation of being a bastion for bleeding-heart liberals? Unless they are openly teaching a course entitled, in effect, "Why Liberals Should Rule the World," professors have no business introducing their political bias to students. Their job is to teach the curriculum of their subject, not churn out a bunch of Marx-worshiping, Bush-hating, Che Guevara-loving, pinko graduates who will go out into the world woefully ignorant that most Americans think entirely differently from the way they do.

As for those mamby-pamby professors who whine about students who have the audacity to tell people on the outside what is actually going on in American classrooms, now you know what it's like to be in the real world where consumers are bosses and producers take orders. You've got the cushiest job on the planet, so buck up and take a little criticism like the rest of us have to on Planet Reality. Professors are like cloistered monks who spend their entire lives protected from the buffeting of the marketplace of ideas, where the rest of us work. Think about it: K-12, four years of undergraduate schooling, four to six years of graduate education, maybe a post-doctoral appointment or two, then assistant professor, associate professor, and finally full professor with tenure. It's womb-to-tomb socialized security. No wonder professors are paranoid about public disclosure of their work.

But thanks to the Internet, the gig is up!

Michael Shermer is the publisher of Skeptic magazine (skeptic.com), a monthly columnist for Scientific American, an adjunct professor in the School of Economics and Politics at Claremont Graduate University and the author of 10 books.

Being offended vs. being indoctrinated

By Greg Lukianoff

Hello Michael,

I think you make a lot of important points in your post, but you tend to conflate the evidence of bias in academia with indoctrination. A better statistic can be found in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education-Gallup Poll. According to this poll, 29% of 25- to 34-year-olds, 41% of 45- and 54-year-olds, and 60% of those over age 65 responded that professors "often" use their classrooms to espouse their own political views. Whether the real number is closer to 29% or 60%, these are powerful statistics when you are dealing with millions of students.

But is having an opinionated professor really the same as indoctrination? I have seen claims -- often from conservative students -- that students have a right not to be "harassed" by the left-leaning opinions of their professors. This drives me nuts because if there is one thing conservatives should not be doing, it is legitimizing the idea that merely being exposed to different points of view is the same thing as harassment. Harassment rationales are used to shut down people with dissenting opinions (often the socially conservative, the un-PC, or the merely unlucky) far too often.

Certainly, there are gross abuses committed by university professors against the right of private conscience of their students. California had one spectacular example back in 2003, when an adjunct professor at Citrus College gave an extra-credit assignment in which students had to write and mail letters to President Bush (pdf) opposing the Iraq war. Students were not allowed to take any other stance. This was wrong on multiple levels: It was an abuse of power, it was coerced speech, and it was arguably indoctrination.

I must emphasize, however, that the worst abuses are not coming from the professoriate; they are coming from the ever-expanding army of college administrators. One recent ghastly example that received woefully inadequate press attention was a true thought reform program at the University of Delaware. In this program, all 7,000 residents of the university's dormitories were required to attend coercive and unabashedly ideological "treatments" (the actual term administrators used) with the explicit goal of getting students to adopt specific points of view with regard to issues such as morality, environmentalism and sexuality. Resident assistants were required to give students questionnaires on what races and genders they would date with the goal of getting students to be more open to dating other races or genders. One student, who in one of these exceedingly creepy "one on one" sessions answered "none of your damn business" to the question "When did you discover your sexual identity?" was written up by an RA and reported to the administration (pdf). That's only the tip of the iceberg and, shockingly, the Residence Life program at the University of Delaware still seems to believe this was a good program. It is chilling that we are raising a generation of citizens who believe it is their right to mandate the appropriate views that other citizens should have. It's a formula for totalitarianism.

You really must check out some of these other programs, too, Michael. The Michigan State University "Student Accountability in Community" punishment system is equally terrifying, as it required students who demonstrated aggressiveness (one example given was a girl who slammed a door in a fight with her boyfriend) to sit down for four mandatory sessions with a pseudo-psychologist in order to make them speak "correctly" about what they had supposedly done wrong. No wonder students over the last two decades have come to believe that they have the right to destroy -- and in some cases even burn -- student newspapers that have opinions they dislike. I shudder for the republic if the next generation of leaders brings such fundamentally anti-democratic thinking to America's institutions of power.

Greg Lukianoff is a constitutional lawyer and the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (thefire.org). He is a frequent guest on national TV news programs and a blogger at the Huffington Post.

==

Vanishing Conservative—Is There a Glass Ceiling? (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237418643_The_Vanishing_Conservative-Is_There_a_Glass_Ceiling)

Article (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237418643_The_Vanishing_Conservative-Is_There_a_Glass_Ceiling)

:{:{}:

(https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/20856203_Stanley_Rothman)

Stanley Rothman}:

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(https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Robert_Lichter)

}:

Robert Lichter (https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Robert_Lichter)=

--

The radical personality: Social psychological correlates of new left ideology (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/226630815_The_radical_personality_Social_psychological_correlates_of_new_left_ideology)

Article (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/226630815_The_radical_personality_Social_psychological_correlates_of_new_left_ideology)

Sep 1982   

Political Behavior

:{:{}:

(https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Robert_Lichter)

Robert Lichter}:

:{:{}:

(https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/20856203_Stanley_Rothman)

Stanley Rothman}:

-

This paper describes and tests a model of radical personality based upon social psychological correlates of New Left ideology. Following methodological criticism of studies that portrayed radicals as psychologically liberated, a model of psychopolitical rebellion is described as an inverted form of authoritarian personality. This model was ..

The Vanishing Conservative—Is There a Glass Ceiling? (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237418643_The_Vanishing_Conservative-Is_There_a_Glass_Ceiling)

Article (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237418643_The_Vanishing_Conservative-Is_There_a_Glass_Ceiling)

:{:{}:

(https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/20856203_Stanley_Rothman)

Stanley Rothman}:

:{:{}:

(https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Robert_Lichter)

Robert Lichter}:

==

==

ben s rANKS HIGH GGL

Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America's Youth (review)

Evan Baum (https://muse.jhu.edu/search?action=search&query=author:Evan%20Baum:and&min=1&max=10&t=query_term), Laura W. Perna (https://muse.jhu.edu/search?action=search&query=author:Laura%20W.%20Perna:and&min=1&max=10&t=query_term)

The Review of Higher Education (https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/172)

Johns Hopkins University Press (https://muse.jhu.edu/search?action=browse&limit=publisher_id:1)

Volume 28, Number 3, Spring 2005 (https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/9652)

pp. 423-425

10.1353/rhe.2005.0004 (https://doi.org/10.1353/rhe.2005.0004)

REVIEW

View Citation (https://muse.jhu.edu/view_citations?type=%20article&id=179941)

Additional Information (https://muse.jhu.edu/article/179941/summary#info_wrap)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:

Evan Baum (bio) and Laura Perna (bio)

Ben Shapiro. Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America's Youth. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2004. 256 pp. Cloth: $22.99. ISBN: 0-78526-1486.

In the words of the author, Brainwashed is meant to "rip the cover off of [sic] a system that for too long has claimed diplomatic immunity while simultaneously feeding students a steady diet of leftism" (p. xviii). Underneath the poorly written substance of the book, much of which seems to be a personal vendetta against UCLA Professor Robert Watson, is a devout hatred of higher education that typifies the arguments of such [End Page 423] neo-conservatives as Dinesh D'Souza, Diane Ravitch, and David Horowitz. A recent graduate of UCLA, 20-year old Ben Shapiro is a nationally syndicated columnist with Creators Syndicate, an international distributor of features to newspapers and internet sites. He is perhaps best known for his conservative and controversial columns in UCLA's Daily Bruin and the social lore surrounding his dismissal from the paper, the focus of Chapter 11.

Shapiro's central thesis is that the academy is overwhelmingly comprised of people who are anti-Republican, anti-Israel, and anti-American, against capitalism, religion, war, and God, while being pro-Democrat, pro-Islam, and pro-Iraq, in favor of socialism and communism, affirmative action and multiculturalism, homosexuality, abortion, euthanasia, radical environmentalism, and moral relativism. Despite the book's title, the text is often more an indictment of social policy and liberal ideology than an attack on higher education. Shapiro organizes his discussion of these themes into 12 chapters and concludes by outlining recommendations for conservatives in a brief (six-page) chapter entitled "Solutions."

A critique of his arguments is warranted, at least in part, by the fervor underlying his categorization of the typical American faculty member. The book has serious methodological limitations, as the author consistently provides no, incomplete, or biased support for his assertions. To "document" the ways in which the academy brainwashes students, Shapiro relies on one-sentence quotations from faculty members without providing any additional information, including the extent to which one faculty's view was representative of all faculty, whether the statement was related to the faculty's area of expertise, whether it was based on any research, or whether it had instructional purposes beyond indoctrination. Shapiro also inappropriately generalizes from his experiences at UCLA to the experiences of all students at all institutions. When included, sources supporting his perspective are drawn from conservative organizations, talk radio, and online reactionary media outlets. The irony in Shapiro's presentation is that, while his concluding recommendation to students is, "Please, think for yourselves" (p. 182), his own conservative brainwashing seems little different from the left-wing version he so vigorously opposes.

It is tempting to critique the book line-by-line, not only because of the methodological flaws but also because of the pervasiveness of inflammatory language. Two of the more outrageous examples are: "Many professors excuse and even encourage pedophilia" (p. 62) and "Professors are willing to go out on a limb to kill babies" (p. 95). We stopped counting the number of times that he used the word "idiot."

The general style and structure of the argument may be illustrated by a representative example. In Chapter 2, "Partisan Politics," Shapiro summarizes opposition to legislation that he favors, the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, by stating that professors advocate for a "big, expensive, useless form of welfare that keeps teen pregnancy high, work ethic low, and the upper class paying massive taxes" (p. 13). He then quotes Professor Shelia Kamerman of Columbia University: "There is a fantasy that these changes are going to significantly reduce out-of-wedlock childbirth and teenage pregnancy. But very little attention is being paid to the consequences for the children" (p. 13). Shapiro fails to mention that Dr. Kamerman is the Compton Foundation Centennial Professor of Social Work and a nationally and internationally recognized expert on child and family policy. He also does not critique the basis for her statement but trivializes it: "Kamerman knows the trick: When you have no grounds for a real argument, weep for...

...

==

https://theconversation.com/does-college-turn-people-into-liberals-90905

oes going to college make students into political liberals (https://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-mooney/does-college-make-you-lib_b_1312889.html)?

Conservative activists have claimed that universities brainwash students and indoctrinate (https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/brainwashed-ben-shapiro/1100329831#/)them into believing a liberal ideology. The line of reasoning goes like this: Liberal college professors tell students “what to think,” and “what to think” is that conservatives and their positions are to be dismissed. A state lawmaker in Iowa (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2017/02/22/an-iowa-republican-wants-universities-to-ask-prospective-professors-how-would-you-vote) has even suggested universities consider political affiliation in connection with hiring practices in order to balance out the distribution of political representation on the faculty.

Conservatives on campus feel outnumbered, given that about 60 percent of faculty (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/01/11/the-dramatic-shift-among-college-professors-thats-hurting-students-education) identify (https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/content/professors-and-their-politics) as politically liberal (http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-gross-academia-conservatives-hiring-20160520-snap-story.html). This imbalance supposedly hurts research (https://nypost.com/2014/10/12/liberal-bias-in-academia-is-destroying-the-integrity-of-research/), stifles open discourse (http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2016/12/20/liberal-professors/) and impairs overall education (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/01/11/the-dramatic-shift-among-college-professors-thats-hurting-students-education/?utm_term=.690e3fd9c364). Missing in this debate, however, is large-scale empirical evidence on how going to college actually impacts students’ attitudes.

Our findings

We are a group of academics interested in understanding how people of different religious, political and philosophical views interact. We are gathering data in a national study of college students called IDEALS (https://www.ifyc.org/IDEALS).

Although we have partnered with the Interfaith Youth Core, a Chicago-based national nonprofit (http://990s.foundationcenter.org/990_pdf_archive/300/300212534/300212534_201607_990.pdf) that partners with colleges and universities to promote interfaith cooperation, our work in this area predates (https://www.ifyc.org/ideals/history) the organization and serves as the basis (https://www.ifyc.org/ideals/history) for the current IDEALS project.

The IDEALS study started following (https://www.ifyc.org/ideals/history) students when they entered college in 2015. Data on many topics, including tracking how students’ attitudes toward liberals and conservatives changed, were then gathered from the same students during their second year of college.

We measured how students viewed each political group separately along four dimensions. Specifically, we asked respondents the extent to which they thought liberals and conservatives were ethical, made positive contributions to society, and were people the student had something in common with. We also asked students if they had a positive attitude toward each group. The same questions were asked at the beginning of each student’s freshman and sophomore years.

These four attitudes are a great place to start gathering empirical support to test whether colleges are turning students against conservatives. If faculty were “telling students what to think” and students were internalizing these ideas, we’d expect to see evidence during the students’ impressionable first year.

Gains across the spectrum

The result (https://www.ifyc.org/ideals/firstyear)? In our nationally representative sample (https://www.ifyc.org/IDEALS/information) of over 7,000 undergraduates at more than 120 colleges (https://www.ifyc.org/sites/default/files/resources/IDEALSparticipants.pdf) who answered both the first-year and sophomore questionnaire, students did demonstrate an increase in appreciative attitudes toward liberals after a year of schooling.

Among all students, 48 percent viewed liberals more favorably in their second year of college than when they arrived on campus. However, among the same students, 50 percent also viewed conservatives more favorably. In other words, college attendance is associated, on average, with gains in appreciating political viewpoints across the spectrum, not just favoring liberals.

The data show 31 percent of students did develop more negative attitudes toward conservatives. However, just about the same amount, 30 percent, developed more negative attitudes toward liberals.

Moreover, the data show us that the most growth in appreciation happened among people who were initially least appreciative of either liberals or conservatives. In simple terms, first-year students who begin college really disliking liberals or conservatives have their attitudes soften in college.

Turning to institutional type, students who attend a private college had a higher initial appreciative rating of liberals than their counterparts at public universities. However, overall views changed at both private and public colleges in the same way. Appreciative attitudes toward conservatives increased between the first and second year of college at both private and public to approximately the same degree.

Also, students trend toward appreciating liberal ideologies – both when they first come to college and after their first year. So, while students still favor liberal ideologies over conservative ones, this gap does not widen over the first year. ...Why? We don’t know the answer. However, our best guess is this finding might ultimately have little to do with faculty directly and instead relate to the climate that campuses strive to create for the expression of diverse viewpoints, political and otherwise. While students may come to college never having met someone on the political “other side,” it is hard to avoid doing so in college. One central aim of higher education is to encourage contact, debate, discussion and exposure to persuasion from different kinds of people.

After a year of college, in other words, it might be more challenging for students to brand all liberals or conservatives as wrongheaded when they are studying, eating and learning alongside them. These experiences might even help students appreciate others as people with diverse histories and shared interests in working toward common goals.

One takeaway is clear: It appears as though the first year of college is doing what it should, exposing students to experiences that teach them how to think rather than what to think.  endit1Political views

https://theconversation.com/topics/liberals-36271}:

ENDIT2

TWO BAK

becoming bak b/c main name

SEE ACAD SUPPRESS

MERRI OK

see liberal prof univ brainwash main for older

badish code

old idea, new tag 819

see acad suppress see student suppress

see campus free speech BS

// liberal media BS

see hackademics

see koch-ademia

see moral panic for kids  bird vaxx

see palestine Gaza

see david brooks

foghorn gotcha BS

bak pinko 9 22 endit1

pinko myth provides basis for, add foreigner state of exception Am 1st

{{ aha 3 25

see 1st amend ppl lose ACTIVIST SUPPRESS, STUDENT SUPPRESS --> FAscism

aha yikes this is seen as righteous corrective action, punishment of those ppl

foreigners, but students are spoiled, captured by radical lunatic pinko left accuse real am of being racists [and greedy?]

erode incrementaL ATTACK START WITH ILLEGAL ALIENS, STATE OF EXCEPTION/ EMERGENCY POWERS? CDA 1ST NATIONS WATER PROTECTORS FROM CORP PIPELINE DAPL

//

RUBIO PULLED GREEN CARD FOR COLUMBIA STUDENT GAZA 3/1025

AN 3 25

Trump (https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/trump) is following Putin’s, Xi’s, and Orban’s playbook. First, take over military and intelligence operations by purging career officers and substituting ones personally loyal to you.

Next, subdue the courts by ignoring or threatening to ignore court rulings you disagree with.

Intimidate legislators by warning that if they don’t bend to your wishes, you’ll run loyalists against them. (Make sure they also worry about what your violent supporters could do to them and their families.)

Then focus on independent sources of information: the media and the universities. Sue media that publish critical stories and block their access to news conferences and interviews.

Then go after the universities.

Last week, Trump threatened in a social media post to punish any university that permits “illegal” protests. On Friday he cancelled hundreds of millions in grants and contracts (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/07/nyregion/trump-administration-columbia-grants-cancelled-antisemitism.html) with Columbia University.

This is an extension of Republican tactics before Trump’s second term. Prior to Trump appointing her ambassador to the United Nations, former Representative Elise Stefanik (Harvard class of 2006) browbeat presidents of elite universities over their responses to student protests against Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, leading to several presidents being fired.

Senator Josh Hawley (Stanford class of 2002 and Yale Law class of 2006) called the student demonstrations signs of “moral rot” at the universities.

But antisemitism was just a pretext.

JD Vance (Yale Law 2013) has termed university professors “the enemy” and suggested using Victor Orban’s method for ending “left-wing domination of universities.”

I think his way has to be the model for us: not to eliminate universities, but to give them a choice between survival or taking a much less biased approach to teaching. [The government should be] aggressively reforming institutions … in a way to where they’re much more open to conservative ideas.”

Trump is also targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion programs on university campuses.

But of all Trump’s and Republicans’ moves against higher education, the most destructive is the cancelation of research grants and contracts. The destruction is hardly confined to Columbia and other suspected left-wing bastions.

Research universities depend on funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

Trump reportedly aims to slash the budget of the National Science Foundation by up to two-thirds (https://www.science.org/content/article/my-boss-was-crying-nsf-confronts-potentially-massive-layoffs-and-budget-cuts). And he’s instructed the National Institutes of Health to no longer honor negotiated rates for “indirect costs” on grants that it administers — money that universities use for laboratory space and research equipment.

In defiance of court orders, Trump has largely maintained a freeze on NIH funding.

As a result, many of America’s great research universities have stopped hiring and are cutting Ph.D. programs — in some cases rescinding offers to accepted students.

Trump’s moves are consistent with the tyrant’s playbook, but they’re also jeopardizing America’s national security and competitiveness.

Trump speaks of putting America First, but his attack on the nation’s great research universities is ensuring that the U.S. comes in second — to China.

Although America has long been the global leader in scientific output, China is now surging ahead. Even before Trump’s cuts in research funding, China was projected to match U.S. research spending within five years.

China has already surpassed the U.S. as the top producer of highly cited papers and international patent applications. It now awards more science and engineering Ph.D.s than the U.S.

Tyrants close universities. Fascists burn books. Trump is destroying America’s most important asset — its innovative mind. }} end aha

an states n? 5 25

Why are right-wingers so scared of ideas?

Are their minds so weak that mere exposure to certain books will infect them with what Elon Musk calls “the woke mind virus”?

They don’t want you inoculated against measles, but they’re doing their damnedest to inoculate Americans against knowledge.

Novels upset them; poetry (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/amanda-gormans-inauguration-poem-banned-by-florida-school) upsets them; science upsets them; history upsets them; art upsets them; questioning of authority upsets them.

Universities really, really upset them — all that interrogating norms; all that challenging orthodoxy; all that critical inquiry.

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To that end, Donald Trump’s going to war (http://www.nytimes.com/article/trump-university-college.html) with Harvard, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, even Penn, his alma mater.

Ron DeSantis beat him to it: The governor’s been trying for years to regulate speech, impose restrictions (https://floridaphoenix.com/2022/11/21/florida-is-turning-its-back-on-the-new-south-embracing-its-dixie-fied-past/) on what teachers can teach, and decree which books the state of Florida finds “acceptable.”

While he’s had some success in K-12, enabling Moms for Liberty and their ilk in their book-banning crusade and threatening educators with dire consequences if they mention the existence of gay and trans people, some judges, unsurprisingly partial to the First Amendment, have slapped him down.

DeSantis, nothing if not energetic in his rage, is now determined to shield our precious college students from Dangerous Thoughts.

Choose the administrators. Choose the presidents. Control the universities.

The University of Florida needs a new dean of Liberal Arts and Sciences — with 40 majors and more than 10,000 students, it’s the largest college at UF.

They got as far as interviewing four highly qualified candidates: two mathematicians — UF’s own Kevin P. Knudson and Maggy Tomova, dean of UCF’s College of Science; Ryan Schroeder, dean of Georgia Southern’s College of Behavioral and Social Sciences; and Robert Brinkmann, a professor of Geology and dean of Liberal Arts and Science at Northern Illinois University.

‘Radical DEI progressives’

But two weeks ago, the governor blew up the search. Demanded UF stop it.

Seems the finalists, admired scholars and seasoned leaders, are crypto-Marxist, Trump-hating eggheads bent on destroying America.

An anonymous social media account calling itself “Commies on Campus” ran shrieking to Bryan Griffin, DeSantis’ communications director, calling all four “ radical DEI progressives (http://www.tampabay.com/news/florida-politics/2025/04/28/desantis-uf-university-search-dean-liberal-arts-college/).”

The Commies posted slick, selectively edited videos of candidate interviews, slamming (https://x.com/CommiesonCampus/status/1915039971112571062) Brinkmann for stating the obvious: “We have people in charge of things in our country that don’t have any business being in charge of those things,” and Knudson for being proud that as head of UF’s Honors Program “we were able to increase the number of African American and Hispanic students in the program.”

As if that’s somehow shameful.

Kent Fuchs, UF’s invertebrate of an interim president, sent out a memo pretending “terminating the search” was the only thing to do, what with the university also in the middle of hiring a permanent president.

Fuchs has never said no to DeSantis.

He does as he’s told, facilitating the hiring of our data-challenged surgeon general at UF’s medical school and trying to stop professors (https://floridaphoenix.com/2021/11/15/desantis-reveled-in-u-f-s-top-5-status-now-his-minions-threaten-its-academic-freedom/)from testifying on voting rights.

Academic freedom doesn’t matter; the professors’ expertise might pose a “conflict of interest to the executive branch of the state of Florida.”

As if serving the interests of the executive branch should somehow be the mission of a university.

UF remains a distinguished institution, though slipping in national rankings of public universities. It was No. 5 a couple of years ago but is now No. 7.

Still pretty good, especially given DeSantis’ obsessive attacks on higher education in the state.

But allowing some trifling X account to dictate policy at Florida’s flagship university won’t exactly burnish UF’s reputation.

All-purpose insult

Whoever the “Commies on Campus” may be, they weren’t paying attention in political science class.

They call anything they don’t like “communist:” LGBTQ, feminism, secularism, programs for the poor, addressing the climate crisis, taxing the rich, giving anyone without one of those useful White Man Cards a fair shot in life.

“Communist” is MAGA’s all-purpose insult.

Read a book, kids: While real live commies like the ones in North Korea, Cuba, or China may think religion is the opiate of the masses and rich folks (except the leaders of these countries) shouldn’t exist, they’re not keen on stuff like feminism, they persecute gay people, and they sure as hell don’t favor DEI.

Ask the Uighurs (http://www.hrw.org/news/2023/09/13/chinas-beautiful-xinjiang-continues-oppress-uighurs).

Yet DeSantis, a man educated beyond his intelligence, takes what these nameless chuckleheads say at face value.

There are in fact a number of well-regarded Marxist scholars at American universities. Yale, the governor’s alma mater, has a reading group studying Marxism and Cultural Theory (https://whc.yale.edu/programs/working-groups/marxism-and-cultural-theory).

Nevertheless, DeSantis emerged from the Red Menace of New Haven untainted.

He’s also unimpeded by understanding what universities are supposed to do.

An academic’s job is to research everything from the Roman Republic to astrophysics to Norse sagas to gene structure to the ideology of slavery to economic and political systems, which requires reading across the spectrum from “Das Kapital” to “ The Road to Serfdom (http://www.cato.org/policy-report/november/december-2022/hayeks-collected-works)“ and presenting their data and knowledge to students.

We call this “education.”

It’s embarrassing how MAGAs deem Hungarian (or Putinist) authoritarianism OK, even admirable, while “communist” is the gravest of insults and socialism is a mortal sin.

Perhaps they’re unaware socialism is viewed favorably by around 36% (http://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2022/09/19/modest-declines-in-positive-views-of-socialism-and-capitalism-in-u-s/)of Americans.

That’s almost the same number who say they strongly support Donald Trump. (https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/trump)

Ideas are not viruses

The point is, ideas are not viruses: Mere exposure to communist thought doesn’t turn you into a communist, any more than reading James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room” makes you gay, any more than reading “The Wealth of Nations” ensures you’ll become a rabid capitalist.

But MAGAs don’t do high-level thinking: It makes their heads hurt. They simply react.

Loudly. Ignorantly. Irrationally.

Commies on Campus now has a new project: trying to influence who will become the new president of the University of Florida.

UF has announced a finalist.

One finalist. Chosen in secret.

He is Dr. Santa Ono, a Canadian American immunologist.

The Commies say he’s some kind of woke monster who, as president of the University of Michigan, created “THE LARGEST #DEI EMPIRE in the country.”

Their evidence? Christopher Rufo, the febrile New College trustee last heard claiming immigrants were eating cats and dogs (https://floridaphoenix.com/2024/09/23/lying-like-a-champ-for-america/), calls Ono “left-wing” and points to a 2023 commencement address in which he made the unimpeachable statement, “The climate crisis is the existential challenge of our time.”

Florida gubernatorial candidate and Trump acolyte U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, never losing a chance to ingratiate himself with MAGA voters, demands UF “ go back to the drawing board (http://www.tampabay.com/news/education/2025/05/07/conservative-voices-are-pushing-back-uf-presidential-pick-ono/).”

Donalds’ hair is on fire because Ono once said, “Racism is one of America’s original sins.”

Deep breath, people: 1. Both of Ono’s statements are perfectly true; and 2. Rufo, Donalds, and the Commies need to update their intel.

Ono has changed his tune. No longer a champion of diversity, he’s now singing from the DeSantis Hymnal, declaring himself in “total alignment” with the governor’s anti-woke crusade.

“I have the same views as this governor,” Ono said.

Bend the knee

During his three years at Michigan (the shortest tenure of any president in the university’s history), Ono initially won praise for prioritizing sustainability and anti-racist projects. Students say he was personable and accessible.

Then Trump happened, and, like too many university administrators, he bent the knee, shutting UM’s DEI office, cracking down on student protest, and creating, as one faculty member said, “ a surveillance state (http://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2025/05/05/santa-ono-leaving-for-university-of-florida-reactions/83460844007/).”

Seems he deployed plainclothes officers police to trail and photograph people on UM’s campus.

No wonder DeSantis likes this guy.

Santa is a real scholar, a proper scientist, with academic and administrative qualifications that could have been a great fit at UF. He’s streets ahead of DeSantis’ last hand-picked president, the empty, in-over-his-head Ben Sasse, whose one discernable talent was spending (https://www.alligator.org/article/2024/08/sasse-s-spending-spree-former-uf-president-channeled-millions-to-gop-allies-secretive-contracts)other people’s money.

In a Trump-free world, Ono might have become the leader who could protect the institution. He might have pushed back against the governor’s determination to reduce Florida’s universities to football factories with libraries curated by the likes of Christopher Rufo and courses insisting on the divine greatness of America.

Alas, Ono has made clear that’s not him, not anymore.

This is what you get when one incurious, anti-intellectual, and perpetually angry man chooses university presidents in secret.

This is what you get when there’s only one finalist.

Yes, the trustees officially make the job offer, but there’s no chance they’d hire someone DeSantis didn’t like.

This is the reality of higher ed in Florida today.

FIU has one finalist for president. No shock that it’s DeSantis’ former lieutenant governor and Interim President Jeannette Nuñez.

In its presidential search, FAU announced three finalists. Maybe this would be a real contest?

Two had Ph.Ds. and solid higher ed experience. One was a Republican political hack.

You can guess who got the gig.

A ‘plant’ at FAMU?

Florida A&M, still in the process of choosing a president, has four finalists.

Promising, right?

There were initially three on the shortlist, all with extensive university experience. Then a fourth candidate, a woman with ties to top Republicans, appeared.

She’s Marva Johnson, a communications company executive, appointed by then-Gov. Rick Scott to the Florida Board of Education and chosen by Ron DeSantis for the Florida Scholars Academy Board of Trustees.

Commies on Campus have not yet weighed in on this one.

FAMU alumni say she’d be a terrible choice, calling her “ a plant (https://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/local/famu-news/2025/05/08/town-hall-makes-clear-whos-welcome-as-famu-president-and-whos-not/83498446007/)” and likening her to a Trojan Horse hostile to the university’s mission.

But what the alumni want, and what the university wants, probably won’t matter.

What DeSantis wants matters.

As everyone in the unfree state of Florida knows, all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

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Florida Phoenix (https://floridaphoenix.com/) is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com.

no lnx

Alternet

The devastating truth about the GOP's war on education

Thom Hartmann December 31, 2024

“Those who control the present, control the past; and those who

control the past control the future.” —George Orwell, 1984

From outlawing the polio vaccine to ignoring the scientific consensus on gender dysphoria to refusing to wear masks in hospitals to trying to strip evolution and science from our schools, stupid has become fashionable in today’s GOP.

When Republican politicians want to score points, they criticize their opponents as having had “elite” educations; the GOP’s war against Ivy League colleges was particularly evident during the student protests of Israel’s slaughter in Gaza. Congressional Republican inquisitors voices' dripped with scorn and contempt as they grilled university presidents.

It wasn’t always this way.

I remember when the USSR launched Sputnik, the first satellite to orbit the Earth. It was the fall of 1957, I was six years old, and my dad and I watched it arc over our house from our back yard one clear October night. My best friend’s father, a ham radio operator, let us listen on his shortwave radio to the “beep beep beep” it was emitting when it was over North America. I’d never seen my dad so rattled.

That dramatic technological achievement lit a major fire under the Eisenhower administration and Congress. In his January 27, 1958 State of the Union address, Republican President Eisenhower pointed to Sputnik and demanded Congress fund a dramatic transformation of America’s educational system:

“With this kind of all-inclusive campaign, I have no doubt that we can create the intellectual capital we need for the years ahead, invest it in the right places--and do all this, not as regimented pawns, but as free men and women!”

In less than a year Congress wrote and passed the National Defense Education Act that poured piles of money into our public schools and rolled out programs for gifted kids.

I was lucky enough to be enrolled in one of those in 1959: by the time I left elementary school I was functioning at high school and college levels in math, science, and English. I’d had two years of foreign language and two years of experimental music instruction. IQ tests were all the rage: mine was 141 and my best friend, Terry, was 142, something he never let me forget.

Most all of those programs died over the following decades as a result of Reagan’s war on public education, which began with his bringing private religious school moguls like Jerry Falwell and bigots like Bill Bennett into the White House.

Repudiating Eisenhower’s embrace of public education, Reagan put Bennett in charge of the Department of Education, which Reagan had campaigned on shutting down altogether. Bennett is probably best known for defending his proclamation that:

“If you wanted to reduce crime you could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every Black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.”

Much like Bennett back in the day, the catch phrase among white supremacists and their fellow travelers today is that “Western Civilization” is either under attack or at risk because we teach history, tolerance, and critical thinking skills in our public schools, which are often racially integrated. The answer, Republicans will tell you, is to defund our public schools.

When Reagan was elected in 1980, the federal share of total education spending in America was 12 percent; when he left office in disgrace in 1989 amid “Iran/Contra” rumors he’d cut a deal with the Iranians to keep the American hostages to screw Jimmy Carter, that share had collapsed to a mere 6 percent. (It’s 3 percent today.)

Reagan also wanted to amend the Constitution to allow mandatory school prayer, and unsuccessfully proposed a national tax credit — a sort of tax-system-based national voucher system — that parents could use to send their kids to religious schools like Falwell’s.

Reagan made anti-intellectualism a political weapon, repeatedly criticizing colleges and professors throughout his political career. When asked why he’d taken a meat-axe to higher education and was pricing college out of the reach of most Americans, he said that college students were “too liberal” and America “should not subsidize intellectual curiosity.”

Four days before the Kent State Massacre of May 5, 1970, Governor Reagan called students protesting the Vietnam war across America “brats,” “freaks” and “cowardly fascists,” adding, as The New York Timesnoted at the time, “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement!”

Before Reagan became president, states paid 65 percent of the costs of colleges, and federal aid covered another 15 or so percent, leaving students to cover the remaining 20 percent with their tuition payments.

That’s how it works in many developed nations; in most northern European countries college is not only free, but the government pays students a stipend to cover books and rent.

Here in America, though, the numbers are pretty much reversed from pre-1980, with students now covering about 80 percent of the costs. Thus the need for student loans here in the USA.

Ever since Reagan’s presidency, the core of Republican positions on public education have been five-fold:

1. Let white students attend schools that are islands of white privilege where they don’t have to confront the true racial history of America,
2. Use public money to support private, for-profit, and religious schools that can accomplish this (and cycle some of that money back to Republican politicians),
3. Destroy public schools’ teachers’ unions,
4. End the teaching of science, critical thinking, evolution, and sex ed, and,
5. Bring fundamentalist Christianity into the classroom.

Earlier this year, Republican Senator Marco Rubio called America’s public school system a “cesspool of Marxist indoctrination.”

“Dangerous academic constructs like critical race theory and radical gender theory are being forced on elementary school children,” Rubio wrote for the American Conservative magazine, adding, “We need to ensure no federal funding is ever used to promote these radical ideas in schools.”

Instead, multiple Republican-controlled states are now actively gutting their public schools with statewide voucher programs, and instituting mandatory bible instruction or posting of the Ten Commandments. Book bans and panics around queer kids using bathrooms or playing sports are the new wedge issues.

There is no more powerful urge we humans can experience than to protect and defend our children. For most people it beats hunger, sex, and money. So if you’re a politician looking for an issue to motivate voters, just tell them their children are under attack. It’s cynical, but effective.

In an interview for Semafor, Trump’s former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo laid it out:

“I tell the story often — I get asked ‘Who’s the most dangerous person in the world? Is it Chairman Kim, is it Xi Jinping?’ The most dangerous person in the world is [American Federation of Teachers President] Randi Weingarten. It’s not a close call. If you ask, ‘Who’s the most likely to take this republic down?’ It would be the teacher’s unions, and the filth that they’re teaching our kids…”

Just a few months ago, Donald Trump laid out his plan to deal with the “major problem” America is facing. That problem, he said, is:

“[W]e have ‘pink-haired communists teaching our kids.’”

Turning the Constitution upside down and arguing the Founders intended to protect teaching schoolchildren religion, Trump elaborated, arguing that mixing religion, politics, and education was the intention of that document:

“The Marxism being preached in our schools is also totally hostile to Judeo-Christian teachings, and in many ways it’s resembling an established new religion. We can’t let that happen. For this reason, my administration will aggressively pursue intentional violations to the establishment clause and the free exercise clause of the Constitution.”

As Jonathan Chait wrote for New York magazine:

“More ominously, at every level of government, Republicans have begun to act on these beliefs. Over the past three years, legislators in 28 states have passed at least 71 bills controlling what teachers and students can say and do at school. A wave of library purges, subject-matter restrictions, and potential legal threats against educators has followed.”

George W. Bush followed the trend, bragging about his pathetic performance in college at Yale’s 2001 commencement:

“To those of you who received honors, awards, and distinctions, I say, well done. And to the C students I say, you, too, can be president of the United States!”

Similarly, JD Vance gave a speech in 2021 titled Universities Are The Enemy.

This isn’t the first time elected officials have used public education as a political weapon. In 1844, 25 people died and over 100 were severely injured in riots in Philadelphia over whether there should be daily Bible readings in that city’s schools. Two churches and several city blocks of homes were burned to the ground.

The Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 didn’t provoke riots, but was a major event in the history of public education. Tennessee high school teacher John Scopes was charged and convicted of the crime of teaching evolution. Mississippi and Arkansas joined Tennessee in passing laws making such instruction a crime that stood until the 1967 repeal of the Butler Act.

While Republicans across the country successfully rode a wave of white outrage about Critical Race Theory in November’s election, polls suggest the issue is really only meaningful to a fragment of the American electorate: an anti-science “Christian” subset of white Republican voters.

The annual PRRI American Values Survey found:

“Americans overwhelmingly favor teaching children history that includes both the good and bad aspects of our history so that they can learn from the past, versus refraining from teaching aspects of history that could make them feel uncomfortable or guilty about what their ancestors did in the past (92% vs. 5%).

“There are no substantial partisan differences, though Republicans favor excluding aspects of history slightly more (7%) than Democrats and Independents (both 4%). There are few differences across religious traditions or demographics. This consensus holds up across different levels of exposure to critical race theory: 92% of those who have heard a lot about critical race theory, 94% of those who have heard a little, and 93% of those who have heard nothing about it state that we should teach children the good and bad of history.”

Nonetheless, they note:

“[A] majority of Republicans (54%), compared with 27% of independents and only 7% of Democrats, believe that teachers and librarians are indoctrinating children.”

America spent $794.7 billion on primary education last year. For-profit private schools and megachurches that run schools look at that pile of money and drool. Republicans are committed to delivering as much of it to them as possible, regardless of the damage it does to our nation’s kids.

Their strategy for privatizing our public schools is pretty straightforward, and echoes the plan of action Republicans are using right now to replace real Medicare with the privatized Medicare Advantage scam.

First, they falsely claim that they’ll deliver a better product at a lower cost. In the education realm, we see this with Florida and several other Red states now offering vouchers that can be used at private or religious schools to every student in the state.

(Nearly 2,300 private schools in Florida accept vouchers, but “69 percent are unaccredited, 58 percent are religious, and nearly one-third are for-profit.”)

As more and more students use the vouchers to flee public schools, the public schools sink into deeper and deeper financial troubles. Those cut the quality of teaching and upkeep of the school buildings, causing even more students to use the vouchers.

Because the vouchers never cover the full cost of private school tuition (typically they pay for half to two-thirds), the truly poor can’t use them: the result is the public school system becomes ghettoized, leading to even more flight by middle- and upper-class (mostly white) people.

Once the public schools are dead and the state has transitioned entirely to private schools, the state will claim budget problems and begin to dial back the amounts available for vouchers. (The same will happen with Medicare Advantage once real Medicare is dead.)

This will widen the relationship between the educational and wealth divides; the racial and class cleavage will become so great that the state will have effectively gone back to a “separate but equal” educational system. Which, of course, is the GOP’s goal and has been since 1954.

Republicans are generally convinced — and surveys show they’re right — that when people have a good, well-rounded education they will vote for Democrats, who explicitly value science and egalitarian social values.

Thus, keeping our kids ignorant and destroying one of America’s largest unions, all while helping their education and religion industry friends get rich, is a complete win-win.

Much of this battle is playing out in state houses around the country, but there’s a huge and well-funded effort to take control of local school boards as well.

Driving this ethos with a constant flood of anti-intellectual, anti-science propaganda are an army of rightwing podcasters, YouTubers, hate radio hosts, and the billionaire-owned Fox “News” network (among others). They argue, essentially, that “stupid is the new smart.”

Barely coherent politicians like Tommy Tuberville and Marjorie Taylor Greene are their heroes. Donald Trump, who still refuses to release his grades, is their avatar. Bob Kennedy is their avenging angel. And people with college educations — and teachers/professors — are their enemies.

Bottom line: the Republican war on public education and science is real, and if we want to stop it we must get involved. Show up for your local school board meetings and, if you have the time and ability, run for a position on the board.

Lobby your state legislators and support pro-science and pro-education politicians. It’s time to make smart cool again!

Our children’s and grandchildren’s futures are literally at stake.

NOW READ: Poor Trump supporters are about to get a rude awakening — but we shouldn't be celebrating

November 27, 2024, edition of UnHerd, streamed on YouTube

FREDDIE SAYER (HOST): Ivy League colleges. You don't have many nice words to say about the Ivy League schools.

KEVIN ROBERTS (HERITAGE FOUNDATION): Very few.

SAYER: You're very uncompromising about that. It's not that they need radical reform and being turned upside down. You say in terms that you think they should be destroyed.

ROBERTS: I say that unless they end the implementation of the woke mind virus, and if they continue to live off the teats of government -- through research grants, through participating in Title IV federal student loans and grants -- then it's perfectly appropriate, as the Vice President-elect said in his senatorial campaign, for the federal government to seize their endowments. Because they are using that money to fund nonsense. Actually, to empower the Chinese Communist Party's infiltration of our institutions, which is yet another problem that motivates my aggressiveness. And thirdly, educational attainment at those colleges -- those colleges in particular has gone down.

SAYER: So what the federal government, in this scenario, would seize the entire endowment of a college like Harvard University, for example?

ROBERTS: Unless Harvard wants to stop living off the public dole, it would be perfectly appropriate.

Why would the world’s richest man be “f-----” if Trump (https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/trump) loses?

Because under a Harris (https://www.rawstory.com/tag/white-house) administration, Musk may be held accountable for his many abuses of power — for busting unions (https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/09/tesla-accused-by-nlrb-of-chilling-worker-unionizing-efforts-in-buffalo.html) and mistreating workers (https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/12/tech/spacex-elon-musk-former-employees-lawsuit/index.html), for using SpaceX and Starlink to monopolize America’s satellite and space infrastructure, and for using his social media platform to knowingly spread dangerous lies (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/09/10/elon-musk-illegal-immigrant-voting-misinformation/).

When I say “may be held accountable,” I don’t mean Musk would be punished for supporting Trump, as Trump has promised to punish his opponents. Instead, Musk’s many possible violations of the law, including some that are quite recent, may finally catch up with him under a Harris administration.

Musk’s daily million-dollar sweepstakes giveaways to people who have registered to vote in battleground states appear to be clear violations of campaign finance law, which makes it illegal to pay money to people to register to vote.

Campaign finance law also makes it illegal for superPACs to coordinate with candidates. As the person in charge of one of the largest superPACs supporting Trump, Musk’s frequent conversations with Trump would appear to run afoul of these provisions, as well.

In addition, Pennsylvania — the state where Musk began his million-dollar sweepstakes — prohibits illegal lotteries and deceiving consumers by not providing a complete set of contest rules including odds of winning and details on how winners are selected. The district attorney of Philadelphia filed a lawsuit (https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/philadelphia-da-suing-elon-musks-america-pac-1-115224099) Monday to halt Musk’s giveaway.

Musk may also be held accountable for conflicts of interest between his being in “regular contact” with Russian president Vladimir Putin, as reported (https://www.wsj.com/business/elon-musk-vladimir-putin-nasa-administrator-bill-nelson-investigation-8cb3a8fc) byTheWall Street Journallast Friday, and his status as one of the most important national security contractors to the U.S. government through his SpaceX and Starlink enterprises.

The Journalreports that Musk’s regular discussions with Putin — confirmed by several current and former U.S., European, and Russian officials — have involved business and geopolitical tensions.

Musk’s SpaceX, which operates the Starlink satellite system, has a $1.8 billion contract with U.S. military and intelligence agencies. It’s the primary rocket launcher for NASA and the Pentagon. It launches vital national security satellites into orbit and is the company NASA relies on to transport astronauts to and from the International Space Station.

To effectuate these contracts, Musk says he has top-secret security clearance.

How can someone who runs two of America’s most important military and intelligence agencies, and who has top-secret security clearance, be secretly meeting with Putin?

At one point, Putin reportedly asked Musk to avoid activating his Starlink satellite internet service over Taiwan as a favor to Chinese leader Xi Jinping, according to two people briefed on the request.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said The Wall Street Journal’s report should prompt an investigation.

Musk's conversations with Putin would clearly violate Musk’s security clearance if he failed to properly report them to the U.S. government. If classified information was leaked, Musk could be required to give up control of SpaceX, which holds the majority (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/20/us/politics/elon-musk-federal-agencies-contracts.html) of his companies’ government contracts.

Musk has also been in contact with other high-ranking Russian officials, according toTheWall Street Journal,including Sergei Kiriyenko (https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/putin-aide-russia-propaganda-us-election-3b3ef3d2?mod=article_inline), Putin’s first deputy chief of staff. Last month, the U.S. Justice Department accused Kiriyenko of creating some 30 internet (https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/u-s-accuses-russia-of-spending-millions-to-influence-u-s-voters-be531b99?mod=article_inline) domains to spread Russian disinformation, including on Musk’s X, where it was meant to erode support for Ukraine and manipulate American voters ahead of the presidential election.

If Musk has been a witting conduit for Russian election disinformation, he could lose control of X. He could even go to jail.

Musk’s and Russia’s interests have increasingly overlapped. Russian forces occupying the country’s eastern and southern swaths have started using Starlink to enable secure communications and extend the range of their drones. Russian troops also began using Starlink terminals, brought in through third countries, undermining one of Ukraine’s few battlefield advantages.

Earlier this year, Musk gave airtime to Putin and his views on the U.S. and Ukraine when X carried Tucker Carlson’s two-hour interview with Putin inside the Kremlin. In that interview, Putin said Musk was “a smart person” and “you need to find some common ground with him, you need to search for some ways to persuade him.”

But what may get Musk really “f-----” is his leading role in the emerging anti-democracy movement.

Since Musk was born in South Africa, he’s ineligible to become president of the United States. But that doesn’t seem to be stopping him. He’s planning to become CEO of the United States of America, Inc.

The anti-democracy movement includes Musk, along with Peter Thiel (the self-styled libertarian who once wrote (https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian/): “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible” and who invested $15 million in JD Vance’s bid for the Senate), JD Vance, Blake Masters (in whose Senate bid Thiel invested $10 million), tech entrepreneur David Sacks, and blogger Curtis Yarvin.

Yarvin, who comes as close as anyone to being the intellectual godfather of the anti-democracy movement, has written (https://academic.oup.com/book/25370/chapter-abstract/192453833?redirectedFrom=fulltext) that real political power in the United States is held by a liberal amalgam of universities and the mainstream press, whose commitment to equality and justice is eroding the social order.

Yarvin believes democratic governments should be replaced with sovereign joint-stock corporations whose major “shareholders” select an executive with total power, who serves at their pleasure. Yarvin refers to the city-state of Singapore as an example of a successful authoritarian regime.

How to achieve Yarvin’s vision? The first step, as Vance offered (https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right-where-peter-thiel-is-placing-his-biggest-bets) in a 2021 podcast, is to replace “every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state … with our people.”

The second step? We can only guess, but Trump has offered Musk a position in his administration to head up “government efficiency.”

In early October, Musk registered with the Texas secretary of state’s office a new corporation called United States of America, Inc.

If Trump becomes president, will Musk’s United States of America, Inc. replace the administrative state?

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at*

https://robertreich.substack.com/

HARV BLK WOMan pres resign plag BS stefanik 2 dn 1 to go?

Fox host blames the "spider-like cancer" that is diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives for antisemitism | Media Matters for America (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-host-blames-spider-cancer-diversity-equity-and-inclusion-initiatives-antisemitism)

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in recent years, more college graduates (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/23/educational-divide-between-voters-is-growing/) — especially college-educated women (https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/data-download/women-men-college-degrees-good-news-democrats-rcna100833) — have been favoring Democrats over Republicans.

Far-right House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) discussed this trend during a conversation with Rep. Dan Crenshaw (https://twitter.com/highbrow_nobrow/status/1739443445616324799) (R-Texas), claiming that college students are being "indoctrinated" by liberals and progressives. But social media users have been pushing back against Johnson's argument, many of them responding that the GOP's extreme policies — not indoctrination — are driving college-educated voters away.

Johnson told Crenshaw (https://twitter.com/highbrow_nobrow/status/1739443445616324799), "The reasons that…. the Republican Party is attracting, less and less, more highly educated voters is because they spent so much time in the academy. And the universities are run…. usually by liberals almost entirely. And sometimes, by radical liberals, socialists and others. And so, these students are being indoctrinated instead of educated."

After The Intellectualist retweeted a video of the conversation (https://twitter.com/patriottakes/status/1729274507666325802) on X, formerly Twitter, on Christmas Day 2023, many users shot down Johnson's argument.

Former CIA analyst Gail Helt (https://twitter.com/ghelt/status/1739466176118354127) tweeted, "So people who have voted Republican in multiple elections, who finished college decades ago, are just now falling prey to alleged brainwashing? I don't think so."

Deborah Kay, a former Republican, posted (https://twitter.com/wncgirl2022/status/1739444779820237170), "Wrong.. I'm college educated but that has absolutely nothing to do with me leaving the Republican Party. I left mentally in 2015 when Trump came down that escalator, then the October 2016 recording with Billy Bush pushed me further away, then J6 is what made me leave completely."

Kay also tweeted (https://twitter.com/wncgirl2022/status/1739652867248591223), "I refused to vote for anyone in the Tea Party but I definitely felt I was seeing the future of the Republican Party, even then. And it's turned out much worse. I was always more middle of the road and voted both sides of the aisle but I've voted straight Democrat since 2016."

READ MORE:New House Speaker Mike Johnson is quietly frightening (https://www.alternet.org/mike-johnson-2666304250/)

Journalist Bette Dangerous (https://twitter.com/Heidi_Cuda/status/1739697717042180579) posted, "I'm sure this Putinist with the loud closet bones failed to mention Turning Point is the fastest growing group on college campuses — that truth would get in the way of his Russian propaganda."

Pundit Jeri Walker wrote (https://twitter.com/jwalker0X/status/1739609523021652101), "My experience in college was one of discovery. I chose my required subjects carefully & based on my personal curiosity. I chose my electives based on my personal curiosity. I chose to expand my knowledge so I could understand my world more. NO ONE ever tried to indoctrinate me."

Another X user, Gayle Dourn Plantz (https://twitter.com/plantz3610/status/1739647794431013295), tweeted, "There's a positive correlation between education levels & being a Democrat or independent. There's a negative correlation between education levels & religion So yeah, more educated folks tend to be less into religion and more into actually improving the lives of average citizens."

Activist Kitty Ann Swink (https://twitter.com/KitSwink/status/1739705184035701112) told Johnson, "Actually Mike, they educate them.

READ MORE:Mike Johnson's 'Christian nationalism' is 'a greater threat to America than al-Qaida': strategist (https://www.alternet.org/johnson-nationalism-al-qaida/)

*Watch the video below or at this link (https://www.alternet.org/mike-johnson-christian-2666812697).

8 23 mma

CAMPOS-DUFFY (FOX NEWS CO-HOST): It's interesting. This is actually acharter school which claims to be a classical education, and so they've had to do a big, you know, turn around on their point because the parents are really upset. They think, but this a great example -- first, I wanna talk about a couple things. The mom, so calm. I'm impressed. Like, I wouldn't be that calm. Like, you know me. I'm not gonna go in be that nice about it, but kind of very politely educated the teacher who is not very educated, doesn't understand American history, and tried to associate with racism or something like that. So that's one thing. Two, the boy. He's so polite. He's so well-mannered. There was a subsequent video where he comes back, he had just done some podcasts and, you know, sort of gave his point of view and said, you know, I've come back, a lot of kids are now -- he came back to school and other kids are putting don't tread on me patches all over their lockers and their backpacks, and he said, this the sad part, he said I made some new friends, kids that I didn't know before that are now supportive of me, but the teachers were so mean to me, some of the teachers. How disgusting is that? So that was really bothersome.This is a reminder that you are your child's first and most important teacher. That mother taught that son about what don't tread on me. The rattlesnake was the symbol of America because the rattlesnake, if you try to step on it, it's gonna bite you back, and so this is a symbol of standing up. That's what that boy was doing. He's so -- he's such a patriot, I thought, I think that Brian Kilmeade is gonna adopt him.

...

CAMPOS-DUFFY: Well, we see all these scores on how our kids are doing on these, you know, on these national tests and history's very bad. We need to give these tests to the teachers. 

STEVE DOOCY (CO-HOST): I thought they did before they got their teaching certificate.

CAMPOS-DUFFY: No, because they all get licensed through these Marxist teaching schools that we have inside of all these universities. That's also why you have teachers that turn out like that, that have no idea about American history. They don't care about it. They get hired by a classical academy, a charter school where parents are supposedly pulling their kids out of public school to get a better education, and here's what they get. So just always be alert.

an 8 23 no lnx

Texas A&M leaders’ text messages reveal desire to counteract perceived liberal agenda in higher education

Kate McGeeandThe Texas Tribune August 05, 2023

"Texas A&M leaders’ text messages show desire to counteract perceived liberal agenda in higher education" was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

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Two years ago during M. Katherine Banks’ first six months as the president of Texas A&M University, she announced a major academic reorganization of the flagship campus to help it become an internationally recognized top-tier institution. Her plans included dozens of structural changes meant to streamline and better organize the largest public university in the state.

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But text messages released by the Texas A&M University System this week revealed another largely unspoken focus among system leaders that might have also been at play as the school reorganized.

“Kathy [Banks] told us multiple times the reason we were going to combine [the colleges of] arts and sciences together was to control the liberal nature that those professors brought to campus,” regent Jay Graham wrote to regent David Baggett in June as they were discussing the university’s plans to hire journalism professor and former New York Times editor Kathleen O. McElroy. “[W]e were going to start a journalism department to get high-quality conservative Aggie students into the journalism world to help direct our message. This won’t happen with this type of hire!”

Those messages were released as part of an internal investigation conducted to review the failed attempt to hire McElroy, which has rattled the Aggie community in recent weeks amid concerns over how political considerations impact A&M’s operations and academic freedom.

The messages show that many board members, who are gubernatorial appointees, had concerns with McElroy’s perceived left-leaning credentials, including that she taught at the University of Texas at Austin and previously worked at the New York Times. At least some of them displayed a desire to promote conservative causes at the flagship campus and a blatant resistance to recruiting someone who they believed would work counter to those goals.

“While it is wonderful for a successful Aggie to want to come back to Texas A&M to be a tenured professor and build something this important from scratch, we must look at her résumé and her statements made an opinion pieces and public interviews,”regent Mike Hernandezwrote to former president Banks and Chancellor John Sharp, expressing disappointment that the board learned of the hire after it had been announced.

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“The New York Times is one of the leading main stream media sources in our country. It is common knowledge that they are biased and progressive leaning. The same exact thing can be said about the university of Texas,” he continued.

Those perspectives are consistent with Texas conservatives’ recent attempts to counteract what they view as a liberal agenda within Texas’ public universities.

“People on the right think that the left controls education and they've been trying to wrestle that control away,” said Jennifer Mercieca, a communications professor at Texas A&M who focuses on the intersection of democracy and communication. “Unfortunately, our journalism program got caught in the middle of that.”

In Texas, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has largely led that crusade within the state’s public universities. A few years ago, he was part of initial discussions with UT-Austin leaders and donors to create a conservative-leaning think tank that would bring “intellectual diversity” to the school. This year, he championed legislation that eliminates diversity, equity and inclusion offices on college campuses, offices that are largely viewed by conservatives as pushing left-leaning ideologies onto students. Patrick also tried to eliminate tenure for faculty, a longstanding tenet meant to bolster academic freedom on campuses.

“People have had it with the intolerance of any ideas but progressive, DEI, propaganda-ish kinds of ideas on campus,” said Sherry Sylvester, a former aide for Patrick who now works as a public policy fellow at the conservative-leaningTexas Public Policy Foundation and was an ardent supporter of the legislation to eliminate DEI programs this past session. “That is a big effort, a big movement.”

The impact of that movement was on display in the records Texas A&M released this week surrounding the failed effort to recruit McElroy.

Soon after making an initial offer to McElroy, Banks communicated that she wanted to push the announcement until after the most recent legislative session ended. At the time, university leaders, including those at Texas A&M, were negotiating with lawmakers over the DEI legislation, as well as state funding for public universities.

“Bottom line is that the NYT connection is poor optics during this particular legislative session,” Jose Bermúdez, interim dean of the college of arts and science, said to Hart Blanton, chair of the communications and journalism department, via text message on May 11.

Meanwhile, regents expressed disdain for media and academics they saw as liberal leaning. While regents approve tenure, it is typically unusual for them to get involved in university-level hires. The Texas A&M regents oversee 11 public universities and eight state agencies that employ more than 26,000 faculty across the state.

Higher education experts say that education has long been characterized as political. Recent efforts in places likeTexas, North Carolina and Florida have picked up partially due to how well the Republican base responds to the accusations.

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“The notion of woke ideology, and how it supposedly has done all this damage to things has just risen as a political talking point,” said Holden Thorp, former chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a current professor at George Washington University. “It's easy to say the universities are the places that you want to attack this,” citing that the argument has increasingly shown to poll well among conservatives.

According to the internal report A&M released Thursday, Banks received calls from six to seven regents after Texas Scorecard, a conservative website, wrote an article about McElroy that painted her as a “DEI proponent” for her prior research to improve diversity in newsrooms. Board member Sam Torn emailed a quote from the article to Board Chair Bill Mahomes stating he wanted an explanation before he could approve McElroy’s tenure.

The internal report revealed that Banks was heavily involved in behind-the-scenes discussions to walk back the original offer given to McElroy, contradicting Banks’ previous public statements that she had no knowledge of changes to the offer. Banks resigned two weeks before her text messages were made public.

The internal report showed that regents also raised questions about whether they could approve tenure for McElroy, even though she already had been selected through the university’s standard hiring process.

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“Granting tenure to somebody with this background is going to be a difficult sell for many on the [board of regents],” Hernandez said in an email to Banks and Sharp. “My sincere hope is that you both will figure out a way to completely put the brakes on this, so we all can discuss this further. If it’s truly too far down the road for you all to agree to that, the board majority can decide how to proceed and take the heat for the final call.”

Thorp said the regents’ meddling in the university’s hiring process overstepped their role.

“When they approve tenure, what they're doing is saying that they have confidence in the administration to carry out the process that they said,” Thorp said. “The role of the board is to rule against it, if for some reason they think the process wasn't followed. Well, in this case, the process wasn't followed, not because of the content or anything, but because [Banks] didn't put the case forward because of politics.”

Some of the regents also took issue with what they perceived as McElroy’s bias toward conservative viewpoints.

“We can’t just give people a set of facts anymore,” McElroy said in an interview on the public radio program "Here & Now” in 2021. “I think we know that and we have to tell our students that. This is not about getting two sides of a story or three sides of a story, if one side is illegitimate. I think now you cannot cover education, you cannot cover criminal justice, you can’t cover all of these institutions without recognizing how all these institutions were built.”

Sylvester with TPPF pointed to that quote as the reason she was against McElroy’s hiring for the journalism program. She declined to comment on the regents’ text messages but said her organization wants to see more free inquiry within higher education.

“No one is looking for a conservative ideology to drive higher ed,” she said. “But taxpayers and conservative leaders no longer want to underride a left wing divisive ideology that permeates so much of the curriculum.”

Thorp said as the politicization of higher education increases and decisions are made based on politics over policy and procedure, it makes universities “ungovernable.”

“I'm certainly not defending Kathy Banks and her dishonest actions in this, but part of the reason why she resorted to that, probably, is that she didn't have many other choices,” said Thorp, referring to her role in watering down McElroy’s job offer. “Every time you have to do something you're facing this intractable situation where you're either going to get the campus against you or get the board against you. And that's how not functional organizations work.”

Mercieca at Texas A&M said the internal report revealed how McElroy’s hiring was a victim of intervention that creates distrust within what are supposed to be democratic processes within universities.

“What we learned yesterday is that all of those institutional processes and procedures can be overruled by fiat, by powerful others,” she said. “It's not democratic.”

Disclosure: Texas A&M University, Texas Public Policy Foundation, New York Times, Texas A&M University System and University of Texas at Austin have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2023/08/04/texas-am-mcelroy-texts/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

'It all came flooding back': Trump indictment hard on lawmakers left in House Gallery on January 6

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evil b/c pervert class action

https://www.rawstory.com/jim-jordan-2661556363/

no lnx raw 6 23

Jim Jordan leads GOP push to cripple 'fight against disinformation': report

Matthew Chapman

June 19, 2023,

Republican lawmakers are joining forces with far-right activists to attack universities and even private businesses that are investigating the spread of disinformation online — claiming that this amounts to an effort to silence conservatives on the internet, according to a report.

The New York Times posted a details of the actions they are taking on Monday.

"The effort has encumbered its targets with expansive requests for information and, in some cases, subpoenas — demanding notes, emails and other information related to social media companies and the government dating back to 2015. Complying has consumed time and resources and already affected the groups’ ability to do research and raise money, according to several people involved," reported Steven Lee Myers and Sheera Frenkel.

"They and others warned that the campaign undermined the fight against disinformation in American society when the problem is, by most accounts, on the rise — and when another presidential election is around the corner. Many of those behind the Republican effort had also joined former President Donald J. Trump in falsely challenging the outcome of the 2020 presidential election."

The House Judiciary Committee, under Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), has been leading the charge. Meanwhile, a group founded by far-right former Trump adviser Stephen Miller has filed a class-action lawsuit in federal court going after the same entities.

"Targets include Stanford, Clemson and New York Universities and the University of Washington; the Atlantic Council, the German Marshall Fund and the National Conference on Citizenship, all nonpartisan, nongovernmental organizations in Washington; the Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco; and Graphika, a company that researches disinformation online," said the report.

"In a related line of inquiry, the committee has also issued a subpoena to the World Federation of Advertisers, a trade association, and the Global Alliance for Responsible Media it created. The committee’s Republican leaders have accused the groups of violating antitrust laws by conspiring to cut off advertising revenue for content researchers and tech companies found to be harmful."

The new push is part of a broader, years-long conspiracy theory among right-wing activists that the government and "big tech" companies are colluding to silence conservative speech on the internet. There is no evidence of any such conspiracy; in fact, research shows conservative content actually spreads more easily on Facebook and Twitter.

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LNX

There is no evidence (https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/feb/01/facebook-youtube-twitter-anti-conservative-claims-baseless-report-finds) of any such conspiracy; in fact, research shows (https://www.kxan.com/news/texas-politics/do-facebook-and-twitter-silence-conservatives-data-shows-they-actually-dominate/) conservative content actually spreads more easily on Facebook and Twitter.

proxy for pinko prof? strict fr?

mma 3 23

As the Biden administration defends the president’s policy of canceling up to $20,000 of student debt for millions of Americans against a Republican-backed challenge before the Supreme Court, some right-wing commentators are going beyond their old arguments against the policy to make truly outrageous claims about it.

When President Joe Biden first announced his administration’s plan in August to address the very real problem of student debt doubling (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/22/us-student-debt-has-increased-by-more-than-100percent-over-past-10-years.html) in the past decade, which affects (https://educationdata.org/student-loan-debt-economic-impact) tens of millions of Americans (https://www.theguardian.com/money/2021/may/30/us-student-loan-payments-pandemic), conservatives tried arguing (https://www.mediamatters.org/education/right-wing-media-rush-attack-student-debt-forgiveness-will-benefit-millions) that the policy was unfair, would raise inflation, would favor the rich, and had no legal basis.

But when arguments about the policy reached the Supreme Court yesterday (https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/28/politics/student-loan-forgiveness-supreme-court-arguments-takeaways/index.html), some right-wing media figures went far beyond their previous opposition to the policy and levied some egregious new attacks:

Fox News host Mark Levin (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4001291) called Biden’s student loan cancellation policy “a fascistic act by an out-of-control man” who is “cheered by the Marxists in the country.”

OutKick founder Clay Travis: (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4001294) “This was a transparent political attempt by Joe Biden to rig in his favor the 2022 election.”

Travis (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4001297) again portrayed the student debt cancellation policy as a voter turnout scheme: Biden “wanted to drive up young voters’ turnout as much as he could.”

Fox contributor Liz Peek: (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4001282) “You can't just dole out $400 billion to get votes, which is basically what this is all about.”

Media Research Center’s Stephanie Hamill (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4001288) said “it’s almost like a bribery” of voters.

Newsmax host Rob Schmitt (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4001287) said it’s a “vote-buying scheme” to get people “on the narcotic of social welfare.”

Schmitt (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4001289) later portrayed student debt cancellation as Biden wanting “to dump hundreds of billions of dollars that we don't have on 8-balls, Jack Daniels, and flights to Mexico.”

Fox contributor Marc Thiessen (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4001236) claimed student debt cancellation is “an act of stolen valor,” and that Biden is “turning millions of Americans into people who are engaged in stolen valor.”

Turning Point USA President Charlie Kirk (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4001299) used student debt cancellation to attack college education in general, claiming he might not be so opposed if colleges were “producing fruit that loved America.” Instead, he said, they’re the “Wuhan Institute of Virology equivalent of idea pathogens in our country” and asked, “Is this a alleged money laundering scheme to pay off colleges for their Marxist indoctrination?”

Kirk (https://mobile.twitter.com/charliekirk11/status/1630626934815338496) also wrote on Twitter that “college is a scam!”

u tex?

https://www.thefirsttv.com/watch/woke-u-the-next-generation-of-communists/

Length 41:31

The American communists have completely taken over the education system from the elementary level to the universities. This didn’t happen overnight. So how did it happen and why? Jesse Kelly is joined byJames Lindsay to dissect the Marxification of Education

expertitis; emot learning  linda darling hammond; castle? accreditation iowa quit; brainwash agenda 2030, political; CRT; tchrs lose lic 50K fine; dylan mulvaney dancing; commies driven into deepest blue hideyhole; dude has covid trooper

while Auron MacIntyre  [blaze tv, deprived of basic skill vs social pgm; incentive to pump #, oddly not problem for corps}  ]  provides his angle as a from a former public school teacher. Plus,

hippie internet  SDS; clip of AA blue hair, [ pledge alleg to gay flag above] wealthy donors vanity name blg; good seat football;

NATCON:

Will Chamberlain gives a solution that many conservatives can easily follow. For more like this, check out Jesse Kelly’s book: The Anti-Communist Manifesto at JesseKellyBook.com

ttps://dailycaller.com › 2020 › 10 › 23 › chamberlain-regulate-big-tech-to-protect-conservative-speech (https://dailycaller.com/2020/10/23/chamberlain-regulate-big-tech-to-protect-conservative-speech/)

CHAMBERLAIN: Regulate Big Tech To Protect Conservative Speech (https://dailycaller.com/2020/10/23/chamberlain-regulate-big-tech-to-protect-conservative-speech/)

In 2020, there are only two types of conservatives: those who are in favor of regulating Facebook and Twitter to protect conservative speech, and those who are wrong. Will Chamberlain is the publisher of Human Events and Senior Counsel at the Internet Accountability Project. Tags : big tech google twitter Scroll down for comments Will Chamberlain

https://theiap.org › media › press › twitter-shadow-bans-iaps-will-chamberlain (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Will%20Chamberlain%20internet%20conservatives+site:theiap.org&atb=v353-1)

Twitter Shadow Bans IAP's Will Chamberlain - Internet Accountability ... (https://theiap.org/media/press/twitter-shadow-bans-iaps-will-chamberlain/)

WASHINGTON - Twitter's campaign to silence conservatives continued today as it shadow banned Will Chamberlain, a Big Tech critic and Senior Counsel for the Internet Accountability Project. Despite Chamberlain's high profile, his name does not populate among the first results after searching Twitter.

https://nationalconservatism.org › national-conservatism-a-statement-of-principles (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Will%20Chamberlain%20internet%20conservatives+site:nationalconservatism.org&atb=v353-1)

National Conservatism: A Statement of Principles (https://nationalconservatism.org/national-conservatism-a-statement-of-principles/)

The following statement was drafted by Will Chamberlain, Christopher DeMuth, Rod Dreher, Yoram Hazony, Daniel McCarthy, Joshua Mitchell, N.S. Lyons, John O'Sullivan, and R.R. Reno on behalf of the Edmund Burke Foundation. The statement reflects a distinctly Western point of view.

https://www.amazon.com/Anti-Communist-Manifesto-Jesse-Kelly/dp/1668010879

a  rallying cry striking at the roots of today’s major issues, Jesse Kelly uses his trademark bombast, intelligence, and humor to take down the most dangerous philosophy in history and address its resurgence in America. The Anti-Communist Manifesto is for anyone who feels alienated by political and popular culture in the United States and recognizes the danger of communism as it threatens to rip apart America’s social fabric.

:{:{}:

Discover a fresh look at the daily assault on our freedoms from the insidious communist movement in this country. More than a political statement, this book is an insightful drive through history, philosophy, and current events with one of the most entertaining and fearless conservatives in America at the wheel.

From weaponizing race, sex, and gender to hijacking our schools, communism threatens to destroy our cherished American way of life. Featuring practical tools and tactics to not only identify communists but also defend the United States from this malicious enemy, The Anti-Communist Manifesto is an instructive guide for all patriots.}:

bot w

Rise of the Fourth Reich: Confronting COVID Fascism with a New Nuremberg Trial, So This Never Happens Again (https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Fourth-Reich-Confronting-Nuremberg/dp/163758752X/ref=pd_bxgy_sccl_1/130-7785641-1833515?pd_rd_w=a3DQR&content-id=amzn1.sym.6ab4eb52-6252-4ca2-a1b9-ad120350253c&pf_rd_p=6ab4eb52-6252-4ca2-a1b9-ad120350253c&pf_rd_r=DJSHEMADMYT35R25TWVY&pd_rd_wg=aPoAf&pd_rd_r=39b70043-ff98-4ae7-b243-fce5cb03c99f&pd_rd_i=163758752X&psc=1)

by Steve Deace

https://phys.org/news/2023-01-board-shake-ups-threats-tenure-money.html

usatoday

florida Gov. Ron DeSantis's decision to overhaul the board of trustees at a progressive public college was his latest move in a larger movement against so-called "woke" education.

"Like so many colleges and universities in America, New College of Florida has been completely captured by a political ideology that puts trendy, truth-relative concepts above learning," Bryan Griffin, DeSantis's press secretary, told USA TODAY, attributing low student enrollment and other financial challenges to the college's "skewed focus and impractical course offerings."

The shake-up is part of a years-long effort by DeSantis and a growing contingent of conservative leaders to chip away at what they view as higher education's liberal bias. They're shepherding legislation targeting diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and critical race theory, including bills explicitly addressing colleges through provisions that would reduce tenure. They're shaping higher education in more subtle ways, too, including through philanthropic giving.

Observers say these trends will continue into 2023 as legislative sessions kick off and key players ramp up their campaigns for national elections.

What happened at New College of Florida?

New College has a reputation as a left-leaning college. All but two of the new appointees to New College's board of trustees are prominent conservatives.

DeSantis's chief of staff has said the hope is to make New College into something "more along the lines of a Hillsdale of the South."

Hillsdale is a private Christian college in Michigan that has been lauded by some on the right for championing conservative values. The college doesn't receive any federal funding, exempting it from some of the civil-rights mandates typically applied to higher education institutions.

The prospective New College trustees "are committed to refocusing the institution on academics and truth and ensuring that students are receiving a quality education," said Griffin. "The campus will become a place for learning and discourse, as it was designed to be."

New College students have said they're drawn to the school precisely because of its offerings and because its values contribute to its academic rigor, as reported by the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, part of the USA TODAY Network. Among those values: building a "just, diverse, equitable and inclusive community" on campus.

In a statement, New College President Patricia Okker said she sees "tremendous opportunity for New College and I believe that our new trustees will bring fresh ideas and new perspectives. New College has a long history of embracing change, all while being true to our mission of academic excellence."

Is there a liberal bias in higher education?

College students tend to skew more liberal than the general population. In a 2020 survey of 20,000 students across 55 colleges, the most comprehensive analysis of its kind, 50% of respondents identified as liberal, versus 26% as conservative. Roughly a quarter of Americans generally say they're liberal.

However, just 19% of Gen-Z adults—the group of people most likely to attend four-year colleges now—identify with the right, suggesting there are more conservatives on college campuses than among their age group as a whole.

"Most colleges and universities are not extreme," said Samuel Abrams, a visiting scholar at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and politics professor at Sarah Lawrence, a liberal arts college in New York that is often ranked as one of the country's most liberal colleges. With the exception of some liberal-arts schools, particularly in the Northeast, "students are pretty centrist."

Abrams' research suggests administrators and other leaders—from department heads to dorm staff—are the ones driving colleges' leftward shift. "We have undergrads who are a little bit more liberal than the average American, we have faculty who are understandably liberal but not crazy, as well as some conservatives," Abrams said. "And then you have administrators who are extremely liberal activist progressives."

Students continue to prize free speech rights (https://phys.org/tags/free+speech+rights/) on campus but increasingly feel those rights are being trampled upon, according to 2022 polling data from the Knight Foundation and Ipsos. The percentage of students who say speech rights are secure has dropped every year since the survey first asked the question in 2016.

Just last week, news broke that Harvard—where roughly eight in 10 faculty identify as liberal—had rescinded a fellowship offer to Kenneth Roth, the former executive director of Human Rights Watch. Roth is a prominent critic of Israel, which his organization has regularly accused of war crimes against Palestinians.

Critics are blaming the decision on pro-Israel bias within Harvard leadership and describing it as yet another example of the ways in which colleges—particularly elite ones—police thought.

Board shake-up part of larger movement against CRT, DEI

Since 2021, lawmakers in dozens of states have introduced legislation restricting lessons on race and systemic discrimination—often described as critical race theory—as well as on sexuality and gender identity.

For the most part, the bills have centered on K-12 schools. Increasingly, though, the legislation has focused on higher education. Thirty-nine percent of bills in 2022 targeted higher ed, compared with 30% in 2021, according to an analysis last year by PEN America, a free speech and literacy organization.

Another trend: Legislation targeting Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives—for example, DeSantis's "Stop W.O.K.E. Act," whose higher education provisions are on hold for now because of a lawsuit. DeSantis is appealing.

Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and one of the four prominent conservatives appointed by DeSantis to the New College board of trustees, has been at the forefront of the anti-CRT, anti-DEI movement. He and one of the other new appointees—Matthew Spalding, a dean and professor at Hillsdale—also played key roles in the Stop W.O.K.E. act's creation.

Rufo, through his chief of staff, said he would only consent to an interview if the reporter removed her pronouns from her email signature for 90 days. USA TODAY rejected the request and reiterated its desire for an interview but did not hear back. People state pronouns in email signatures for a variety of reasons, including to avoid being misgendered by people with whom they communicate.

"I was honored to be appointed to this board, along with friends and colleagues from the conservative movement," Rufo wrote in a blog post Thursday. "Governor DeSantis has tasked us with something that has never been done: institutional recapture. If we are successful, the effort can serve as a model for other states."

Is New College replacing 'one set of extremism with another'?

Mark Bauerlein, a fellow conservative and recent appointee to New College's board, distanced himself from Rufo, however, saying he'll take a different approach.

"I don't have goals in mind," the Emory University English professor emeritus said, stressing the DeSantis administration hasn't given him any policy prescriptions and he doesn't have an agenda for the role. Bauerlein said he'll start by listening and getting "a feel for the atmosphere of the place."

While "the leftward tilt (in higher education) has certainly happened, it's not a problem if we find that academic standards are being maintained—if we find that the ideals of inquiry and discussion and peer review are held to a good level of rigor," he said.

Bauerlein, who has written about and helped the state of Florida develop K-12 standards, said one of his first tasks might be to compare student projects from the 1990s and more recent work to assess whether "there is some deterioration, whether the standards significantly lower quality than before." He's also curious as to why so many students—close to 70%—are female, and whether DEI efforts are crossing the line.

While having little prior knowledge about the college (https://phys.org/tags/college/) and living in another state, he's prepared for the host of issues he may have to chime in on, from facilities and athletic programs to administrator salaries and contracts.

"I think that the 'transformation' may be a lot slower and less striking than people expect," Bauerlein said.

USA TODAY reached out to the other new appointees but didn't receive responses.

In a statement, Hillsdale's Spalding said, "I appreciate the complimentary nods to Hillsdale College, but we are not going to serve New College's mission by remaking it into a carbon copy of another institution."

AEI's Abrams emphasized the importance of a cautionary approach. "What Florida has to do very carefully is they can't swing too far in the other direction," he said. "Florida needs to make sure that they showcase how viewpoint diversity works. ... We don't want to replace one set of extremism with another."

Another target of conservatives: Academic tenure

In addition to targeting DEI, DeSantis's Stop W.O.K.E Act aims to weaken tenure protections on the grounds that academics need to be held accountable for promoting critical race theory.

Reports indicate some professors in Florida adjusted or altogether removed classes in response to the law.

Tenure,which protects professors from being fired except in extreme circumstances, has long been in decline and for many reasons, including financial ones, said Irene Mulvey, president of the American Association of University Professors. But "what we're seeing right now is really a war," and the renewed focus on tenure by "right-wing conservatives" is one aspect of it, she said.

Proposals to erode or eliminate tenure has come up recently in roughly half a dozen states, she said, primarily targeting professors who teach about race and racism, equity and justice, and gender studies.

"Tenure is what protects academic freedom for faculty in higher education—it's necessary so faculty can promote the free and vigorous open exchange of ideas ... without fear of being fired," Mulvey said. "Trying to take away tenure from faculty is an age-old strategy from the totalitarian playbook to attack education to stop students from learning ideas the state disagrees with."

Pressure could continue to mount this year as more states are expected to consider or implement tenure restrictions, according to reporting by the Associated Press. Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, for example, has vowed to revoke tenure from professors who teach critical race theory.

"The larger strategy is to create divisions ... and then exploiting those divisions in order to win elections and build power," Mulvey said. "It's cynical, it's disingenuous, and the consequences for higher education and democracy are really devastating."

fox stepford mat'l

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-keeps-booking-pharmaceutical-heir-whose-mom-paid-specialist-deprogram-her-wokism

no lnx vid

Fox News keeps booking a pharmaceutical heir whose mom paid a specialist to “deprogram” her from “wokeism”

Mount Holyoke alum Annabella Rockwell works for conservative edutainment organization PragerU, which she credits with freeing her from liberal indoctrination

WRITTEN BY JOHN KNEFEL

PUBLISHED 11/29/22

A spectre is haunting college campuses — the spectre of wokeism. It is an ideology and a cult that separates children from parents, rendering each unknowable to the other. Misery and alienation: This is the goal of these indoctrination centers. But all is not lost. A small band of rebels stand in their way. They are the ragtag freedom fighters at PragerU.

That, at least, is the story the producers and talent at Fox News are telling their viewers.

Leading the charge for liberation is pharmaceutical heir and PragerU director of development for Palm Beach Annabella Rockwell, who can trace her lineage back to the Mayflower, thank you very much. Rockwell fell victim to the siren song of wokeism her first year at Mount Holyoke, a historically women’s college in Massachusetts.

“I studied history and politics at Mount Holyoke,” Rockwell said in a November 15 interview with her boss, Dennis Prager. “Every class was, you know, history, but history with race, history with gender.”

By the time Rockwell graduated in 2015, she was “totally indoctrinated,” she said in a recent interview with the New York Post. Her mom, Melinda, “enlisted the help of a deprogrammer who charged $300 a day as well as Annabella’s old tennis coach, Scott Williams,” to overcome her daughter’s “brainwashing.”

Rockwell had the support of her family’s personal fortune, but she needed something else: a light in the darkness. As she told Fox News’ top star and white nationalist Tucker Carlson on Monday evening, her salvation came at the hands of PragerU, where she now works, when one of its videos came up on a social media feed. This heartwarming story shows how PragerU funnels young people into reactionary politics – and just so happens to be a great branding opportunity to further spread that organization’s propaganda.

“I had to unlearn my four years of wokeism by watching five-minute PragerU videos online for free,” she said.

“Amazing,” Carlson responded. “It is a cult. Its aim is to separate you from the people who love you most.”

Video CitationFrom the November 28, 2022, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight

Teaching history without race or gender is obviously better, which is exactly the type of top-notch scholarship you can get from Prager and his absolutely real university.

Fox News’ Outnumbered analyzed Rockwell's hero’s journey on Monday afternoon, prior to her debut on Tucker Carlson Tonight. Co-host Emily Compagno, a paragon of intellectual rigor — who also knows more than a little about learning history without regard to race or gender — weighed in with the insight and precision that’s become her trademark.

College students are “being taught to hate their country; they’re also being taught to hate their families,” Compagno argued. “And that is step one of true indoctrination.”

Video CitationFrom the November 28, 2022, edition of Fox News' Outnumbered

But, like the totalitarian cult of wokeness itself, Rockwell wasn’t yet satisfied with her conquest. She pushed forward, appearing Tuesday morning on Fox & Friendsto share her tale of woe and redemption, explaining how she finally broke free of her ideological prison.

In 2020, at the height of what has been referred to as the largest protest movement in the history of the United States, Rockwell saw the light.

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VideoCitationFrom the November 29, 2022, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends

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}:

“It wasn't until seeing the riots happening that I realized, OK, this is so hypocritical. Like, why are we fighting for equality and empowerment by burning down people's [PVT PROPERTY = > HU RIGHTS] businesses?” Rockwell explained. “It just doesn't make sense to me.” (One way to make sense of the George Floyd uprisings is to study “history with race.”)

Rockwell closed out the interview with another plug for PragerU. Whatever else the organization’s shortcomings, it appears that marketing is not one of them.

https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/postliberalism/

salon kat j

...For Hazony, the primary issue was about how conservatives understand China, the rising superpower that NatCons see as America's No. 1 rival. Their conference had banned all speakers who are "pro-Xi, pro-Putin, racists or antisemites," although that standard seems malleable at times. (As Political Research Associates' Ben Lorber reported (https://religiondispatches.org/white-nationalist-ideology-shines-through-at-elite-maga-conference-inside-natcon-part-ii/), this year'sNatCon included a meditation on the viciously xenophobic French novel "Camp of the Saints," approving mention of antisemitic Action Française leader Charles Maurras and an address by a former Trump speechwriter fired for alleged ties to white nationalists.) But some integralists, Hazony charged, had "always had a soft spot for dictatorship, for imperialism and for China," and in recent months that had become impossible to ignore, as members of the movement wrote articles praising China's government or culture.

Then there was Compact Magazine (http://compactmag.com/), the hybrid "radical American journal" Ahmari co-founded last March with fellow Catholic Matthew Schmitz and Marxist populist Edwin Aponte. Its professed agenda was to wage (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/22/arts/compact-magazine-conservatives-marxists.html) "a two-front war on the left and the right" and promote "a strong social-democratic state that defends community — local and national, familial and religious — against a libertine left and a libertarian right."

Although Compact has declined to specify who funds the magazine, a source familiar with its operations told Salon that it was launched with significant support from right-wing tech billionaire Peter Thiel — who has funded numerous other "new right" projects, from NatCon conferences to the political campaigns of J.D. Vance, Blake Masters and Josh Hawley — and Claremont Institute chair Tom Klingenstein (another top NatCon donor). Klingenstein did not respond to requests for comment. A source close to Thiel denied that Thiel has directly funded Compact, but couldn't rule out the possibility that an entity Thiel funds has in turn donated to the magazine. In a statement, Ahmari said, "Compact is an independent, for-profit publication supported by our subscribers. A group of investors helped us jump-start it. We respect their privacy and decline to name them."

Both Thiel and Klingenstein spoke at NatCon this year, and a handful of other NatCon speakers attended the integralist conference too. But on the whole, Hazony said, Compact was a bridge too far for most NatCons. While many in the movement were open to "rethinking the commitment to the free market as an absolute principle," and might even support targeted business regulations, he said, there was "no appetite, no capacity among nationalist conservatives to accept the ideal of social democracy as an alternative to the market mechanism."

Integralists had their own complaints. Some also involved foreign policy questions, like whether NatCons' enthusiastic defense of Ukraine amounted to a creeping neoconservative revival, or whether their strident hostility to China reflected warmed-over Cold War politics. But their main concern was more fundamental: NatCons, they charged, were abandoning the populist promise of Trumpism for a seat at the establishment table.

To be sure, NatCon 3 featured critiques of big business, but, with limited exceptions, most amounted to dragging "woke corporations." Ron DeSantis (introduced (https://www.salon.com/2022/09/13/ron-desantis-tries-out-2024-pitch-vowing-vengeance-on-big-tech-and-woke-capitalism/) in Miami as "the future president") spoke dutifully about how free enterprise should be seen as a tool to help "our own people" rather than an end in itself. But his real firepower was saved for war stories: his battle with Disney over Florida's "Don't Say Gay" law, his resolution banning state pension funds from weighing environmental or social justice concerns in investment decisions, a promised law to help Floridians sue tech companies that commit "viewpoint discrimination."

Other speakers called forblacklisting banks that disinvest in fossil fuels; seizing universities' endowments;and making it illegal for employers to ask if applicants attended college, in order to disincentivize young people from entering the "inherently liberalizing environment" of higher education. (In a more recent example, after contrarian billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter and numerous companies stopped advertising on the platform, Republicans suggested (https://twitter.com/holmesjosh/status/1588626474327760904) that congressional hearings into "leftist corporate extortion" might be in order.)...

mirror? real am do not belong in church? pinko prof recycled BS

an 922 david badash

Ron Johnson (https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/?s=Ron+Johnson) (R-WI) is angered Democratic voters are allowed to go to church, college, and be employed by those institutions and even the federal government, saying they have “infiltrated”these essential areas of American life and many others.

An elections and COVID conspiracy theory promotor, Senator Johnson, appearing on far-right-wing talk show host Mark Levin’s Sunday night Fox News show, declared, “what this entire election is about is fighting for freedom.”

It’s a common refrain for the Wisconsin Republican who infamously spent the Fourth of July in 2018 in Moscow, “posing for propaganda photos with Russian officials” as The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/eight-republicans-spent-july-4-in-russia-where-are-the-fireworks/2018/07/06/beae30be-812e-11e8-b658-4f4d2a1aeef1_story.html) noted at the time, while posting a tweet (https://twitter.com/SenRonJohnson/status/1014487741416042497) for his American constituents proclaiming, “What does July 4th mean to me? Freedom.”

READ MORE: ‘Putin’s Favorite Senator’ Ron Johnson Scorched for Claiming Dems Weakened Ukraine by Impeaching Trump: ‘FBI Warned You’ (https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2022/02/putins-favorite-senator-ron-johnson-scorched-for-claiming-dems-weakened-ukraine-by-impeaching-trump-fbi-warned-you/)

Milbank observed Johnson’s Moscow visit came on “the same day it was reported in Britain (https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/07/british-couple-poisoned-in-new-novichok-case-russia-again-denies-involvement/) that two more people had been poisoned by a Russian nerve agent British officials say came from Vladimir Putin’s regime. On the day after the Senate Intelligence Committeeaffirmed the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-cyber/senate-panel-backs-intelligence-agencies-on-russia-trump-conclusions-idUSKBN1JT2YB) that Russia interfered in the election to help Donald Trump.”

Johnson, facing a tight re-election race for a third term despite having promised to retire after his second (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/01/09/ron-johnson-reelection/), is running against Democratic Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes.

On Sunday Johnson suggested to Levin that liberals, Democrats, and anyone on “the left” as he put it, do not have an inherent right to participate in American life on an equal footing as Republicans.

And he accused Democrats of “infiltrating” American life four times.

READ MORE: ‘Wants to Steal Your Money’: Ron Johnson Thinks Rick Scott’s Social Security Plan Is ‘Not Cruel Enough’ Say Critics (https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2022/08/wants-to-steal-your-money-ron-johnson-thinks-ricks-scotts-social-security-plan-is-not-cruel-enough-say-critics/)

“The press is so unbelievably powerful and the left has infiltrated every institution of this country,” Johnson told Levin.

“They started with the college and university system. So they control college of education and journalism and law. And they’ve infiltrated every agency. They’ve infiltrated religions. They’ve infiltrated everything and now we’re seeing the results of that.”

“That’s why our nation is literally on a precipice. We’re at a hinge point in history,” Johnson declared.

“We have to win this election and we have to win many more because we’ve got to push them out of these institutions and return some normalcy, return the values that made this country great,” Johnson, echoing the trumpist mantra, concluded.

READ MORE: ‘Delusional Huckster,’ ‘Charlatan,’ ‘Political Grifter’ and a ‘Virus’: 100-Year Old Newspaper Destroys Ron Johnson (https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2022/01/delusional-huckster-charlatan-political-grifter-and-a-virus-100-year-old-newspaper-destroys-ron-johnson/)

While there is little public polling, the last four polls (https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2022/senate/wi/wisconsin_senate_johnson_vs_barnes-7758.html#polls) show Barnes up over Johnson by an average of 4.3 points.

Saying it “could be one of the uglier races of 2022,” Politico (https://www.politico.com/2022-election/race-forecasts-ratings-and-predictions/wisconsin/senate/) lists it as a “tossup.” As of Monday FiveThirtyEight (https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2022-election-forecast/senate/wisconsin/) puts the Johnson vote ahead of Barnes by 0.2 percentage points.

Watch below or at this link (https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2022/09/infiltrated-senator-angered-democrats-allowed-to-go-to-college-and-church-work-in-government-agencies-video/).

mma 6 22

sTEVE DOOCY(CO-HOST): Battle for the American Mind, Uprooting a Century of Miseducation, a brand new book that hits the shelves today. In it, Pete Hegseth and David Goodwin discuss how American education has been destroyed and what we can do to restore it. Here's an excerpt. "Make no mistake about it the historical singularity that was America's founding was a result of classical Christian education. Full stop. Our founders did not stumble their way to brilliance of 1776. They were forged in the foundry of the education of their time." And Pete and David join us live right now. And they've got the number one book in the world. Who's who?

PETE HEGSETH (AUTHOR, FOX AND FRIENDS WEEKEND CO-HOST): Pete. David.

DOOCY: Thank you very much. David, it's very nice to meet you. We were talking to Pete about this yesterday. This is part of a master plan that a lot of people don't have any idea has been going on for decades.

DAVID GOODWIN (AUTHOR): Right.

DOOCY: Regarding education in the country.

GOODWIN: Yes. Well, you know, that's when I was doing the research, some of the research through the original book, which The New Republic in the early part of the 20th century. I thought I would find a lot about labor unions and a lot about minimum wage, a lot about, you know, the things that we know that the progressives were talking about at the time. But education was in every issue. And I was wondering, why.

DOOCY: Right. And Pete who would –who drew up this master plan?

HEGSETH: Well, there were a lot of – there wasn't one master architect, John Dewey's the father of the progressive educational system.

DOOCY: But they were like-minded.

HEGSETH: Very like-minded. Almost all atheists. Almost all socialists. Eventually, almost all Marxists.And they had a plan to capture the minds of our youngest kids. And we're not talking about the lunacy of higher education. This is K through 12. They knew the affections of young people. Elementary school students would shape the way they view America, their faith, for the rest of their life. And so they set it out on a course. They didn't know exactly where it would lead, Steve. All of these architects of progressives, but they knew where it wouldn't lead: Not toward Biblical wisdom, not toward appreciation for our founding documents.And people say to David I all the time, How do I not know this history?

DOOCY: Right.

HEGSETH: 100-year history. You know why? Because the progressives write the history. They write the textbooks.

DOOCY: Right.

HEGSETH: So, David and I had to dig underneath everything that's hidden to find out the real story of how they captured K through 12.

DOOCY: You know, and David, we've known for a long time that America's colleges, for the most part. are way to the left, very progressive. But I don't think a lot of people realized until the last decade or so when they started looking in America'stextbooks,how far to the left aome are trying to drag K through 12.

GOODWIN: Well, they've had the advantage. When you have the college system, you control the instruments of education all the way down to the kindergarten. Right. Because you train the teachers, you train the administrators, you train the curriculum providers. You're the ones doing the accreditation, the college – at the college level. All of that flows right from the, you know, kind of nodes of control that the progressives had.

DOOCY: And, you know Pete, so many parents got a good look at what their kids were doing during COVID-19. Your first chapter is our COVID 1619 moment.

HEGSETH: It's exactly right. You're at home looking at your kid's curriculum through your laptop, and suddenly there's a new founding date on their screen, 1619 or they're talking about gender pronouns for seven or eight-year-olds.[note no eg]  So we start with the problem, and the first step to any recovery is understanding the depth of your problem. And we outline that. But the best part of the book, in our opinion is those five chapters at the end that are about the solution. AndDavid runs the Association of Classical Christian Schools.

DOOCY: Right.

HEGSETH: Classical Christian Dot Org. There are hundreds of wonderful brick-and-mortar schools across the country that are the exact opposite of what our government schools provide right now. There are online options, there arehomeschoolcurriculum options. The insurgency to take our classroom back has begun, and that's the preferred form of ideological warfare of the weak against the small. You do not have to default to progressive public schools, because otherwise, you're going to war with an educational complex that has 40 hours a week to capture your kid's mind. And that's why we call it a battle. It really is for parents and grandparents.

aha of course goes back to powell memo but right constant cries of victimhood, oppressed by big tech, big gubmint etc etc etc etc

but recall they have to explain why they fail to win the the much vaunted marketplace of idea / polls

sinecure?

11 21 no lnx

'Thought criminals': Aggrieved conservative elites announce new university dedicated to 'truth' — but who’s funding Ii?

David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement November 08, 2021

Bari Weiss. Andrew Sullivan. Jonathan Rauch. Larry Summers.

Those are some of the more recognizable names a new university launched Monday lists on the front page of its website.

Its founder says some of them have been "treated like thought criminals."

The University of Austin (which sounds remarkably like The University of Texas at Austin, founded in 1883,) in an announcement says it is "dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth." It is not currently accredited and offers no degrees.

But some of the people it is attracting have highly-controversial backgrounds. Indeed, some, like Weiss and Sullivan, seem to thrive on creating controversy.

It's clear, from its founder's message, that this is an enterprise dedicated to protect those who use their huge platforms to decry being "canceled."

"Nearly a quarter of American academics in the social sciences or humanities endorse ousting a colleague for having a wrong opinion about hot-button issues such as immigration or gender differences,"Pano Kanelos, the former president of St. John's University and apparently the founder of The University of Austin, writes Monday at Bari Weiss' Substack. "Over a third of conservative academics and PhD students say they had been threatened with disciplinary action for their views. Four out of five American PhD students are willing to discriminate against right-leaning scholars, according to a report by the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology."

Kanelos discusses some of the University's founding faculty – a prerequisite appears to be having been subjected to criticism.

"On our quads, faculty are being treated like thought criminals. Dorian Abbot, a University of Chicago scientist who has objected to aspects of affirmative action, was recently disinvited from delivering a prominent public lecture on planetary climate at MIT. Peter Boghossian, a philosophy professor at Portland State University, finally quit in September after years of harassment by faculty and administrators. Kathleen Stock, a professor at University of Sussex, just resigned after mobs threatened her over her research on sex and gender."

Its FAQ answers the question "Why Austin?" by jokingly replying: "If it's good enough for Elon Musk and Joe Rogan, it's good enough for us."

The big question of course is who is funding this endeavor? The "University" says it will have a physical campus.

That's expensive, as is paying top names.

"We have secured the seed money necessary to launch the university. But we are in the process of securing $250 million, which will enable us to grow into a comprehensive university," it says.

"UATX has requested and is awaiting a tax-exempt determination from the IRS. At present, UATX is fiscally sponsored by Cicero Research, a tax-exempt entity organized under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code."

An online search for "Cicero Research" nets almost nothing, except a one page listing on Cause IQ, a company to help nonprofits grow.

According to that filing for the year ending December 2020, Cicero Research has no full-time employees, no assets, but under "characteristics" is tagged "political advocacy."

Who's actually funding this is currently unknown.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/fox-news-fascism/

Since well before Donald Trump's election, Fox News has served (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/19/fox-news-big-lie-segments-face-judicial-comeuppance/) as one of his movement's most powerful and effective propaganda outlets. In numerous ways both large and small, Fox News has mainstreamed fascist and authoritarian talking points, circulated Trump's thousands of lies and massaged, minimized or falsified the events of Jan. 6 and the ongoing coup against American democracy.

On a near-daily basis, Tucker Carlson and other Fox News hosts amplify white supremacist lies about the "Great Replacement"— even if they don't use that precise term — claiming that white people are the victims of a genocidal plot to "replace" them with nonwhites. New public opinion research shows that this type of white supremacist stochastic terrorism (https://www.salon.com/2021/08/03/republicans-are-increasingly-ready-for-violence-we-look-away-at-our-peril/) has been internalized by tens of millions of white Americans — specifically white Republican and Trump voters — to such an extreme that many of them are willing to condone or participate in acts of political violence in to overthrow Joe Biden's presidency (https://www.salon.com/2021/10/01/terror-millions-of-americans-say-theyd-support-violence-to-restore-to-power/) and American democracy.[when do we get to use the guns, corp medical tyrrany? "]

More than 700,000 people have died in the United States from the coronavirus pandemic -- and this is a low estimate. More than a million Americans are expected to die before the virus is brought fully under control.

Public health experts have documented the direct role that Fox News and other right-wing media have played (https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/4/22/21229360/coronavirus-covid-19-fox-news-sean-hannity-misinformation-death) in encouraging their audience to not be vaccinated against the coronavirus. This is part of a much larger pattern of behavior, in which Fox News hasconsistently fueled and amplified coronavirus denialism (https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/06/25/fox-news-hannity-coronavirus-misinformation/). In total, Fox "News" has been a public health threat (https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/the-data-is-in-fox-news-may-have-kept-millions-from-taking-the-coronavirus-threat-seriously/2020/06/26/60d88aa2-b7c3-11ea-a8da-693df3d7674a_story.html), and bears both direct and indirect responsibility (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/27/briefing/covid-red-states-vaccinations.html) for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Because Fox News has such pernicious influence control over its public (https://www.npr.org/local/309/2020/05/04/849109486/study-finds-more-c-o-v-i-d-19-cases-among-viewers-of-fox-news-host-who-downplayed-pandemic) that it has caused discord, chaos and other forms of dysfunction — almost certainly including interpersonal violence — within families, among friends and across entire communities. When and if American democracy finally succumbs to authoritarianism, its obituary should include Fox News for helping to kill it.

For almost a decade, Jen Senko has been documenting the personal impact of Fox News on the American people. In her 2015 documentary "The Brainwashing of My Dad," she showed in painstaking detail, how Fox News and the right-wing propaganda machine transformed her father into an angry, paranoid, bigoted, political extremist. Her father is only one of the millions of Americans who have fallen under the spell of Fox News and the right-wing hate machine — and by doing so became the base of support for Republican fascist movement.

In her new book, also called "The Brainwashing of My Dad (https://bookshop.org/a/2464/9781728239590)," Senko continues to explore the damaging influence of Fox News and the larger right-wing echo chamber in America's worsening democracy crisis.

In this conversation, Senko details how Fox News functions like a type of cult that uses anger and fear to seduce and control its audience. She also explains how right-wing media creates an alternate universe that offers meaning, community and friendship for the confused, alienated and lonely people — predominantly older white men — who are its primary audience. Senko shares more personal anecdotes about how Fox News and its allied media have destroyed loving relationships,. She also warns that Fox News is priming its audience for political violence to support Donald Trump and the Republican-fascist ongoing coup attempt.

With your documentary, you tried to warn the American people that Fox News and the right-wing media are an extreme danger to the country. But here we are several years later, with America's democracy crisis continuing to escalate as the right has increasingly embraced fascism. How do you feel watching this disaster?

Right now, I'm very, very frustrated. When I made the documentary, I was naïve. I thought to myself, "I'm going to save the world. I'm going to save America." It was cathartic for me to make "The Brainwashing of My Dad."

Now the American people are like the frog in the boiling water. It was lukewarm at first, nice and comfy, and they were all just splashing around a little bit. Then the water gets hotter, and they don't notice. By the time they notice, it's too late and they're boiling.

Given all that has happened and is happening with Trump and the Republicans, my feelings are now panic and despair. I always still have a seed of hope. There are many more people now who did get the message that I was trying to explain about Fox News and where the country was headed. I also have hope because it seems that more Americans are organized to resist.

What do people outside Trump World and the MAGAverse — or who are just generally in denial about the existential threat the country is facing — not understand about what's happening?

Too many people still do not seem to get that what the Republicans and Trump are doing to undermine democracy was long in the planning. It is all like an octopus and it has many tentacles. The head of the octopus is the media.

As fast as perhaps the FBI can catch those who are working to betray the country and commit treason, Fox News is everywhere. There truly is a vast right-wing conspiracy, as Hillary Clinton described it back in the 1990s. This is true whether you like it or not.

Basically, a bunch of oligarchs, evangelicals, racists, mega-corporations and right-wing libertarians got together and planned how they could get rid of government and any policies that serve the public good. What they want is no public schools, no libraries, no post office, no Social Security, no public health option. These right-wing forces want privatization across the board so that they can make as much money as they want, unrestrained, and won't have to pay taxes. Then these same forces got control of the media, and could inject their message right into the public's collective mind.

This right-wing movement also did other things too, such as running for school boards and in other local elections. They used gerrymandering and created a panic about nonexistent voter fraud. But it is the right-wing media that drives the campaign. What shocks me the most is that most Americans still do not understand the big picture.

In your documentary, you showed in painful detail how Fox News and the right-wing machine literally changed your father's personality into a person you no longer recognized. Other Americans have experienced this — perhaps millions of them. What is your dad an example of? How do we understand what Fox News and the right-wing echo chamber did to him as representative of a much larger phenomenon?

My father was seduced by the anger and the excitement. People know that something's wrong, that the system is rigged somehow, but they don't give much thought to how. My father was also retiring from his job, and he found the right-wing media. This gave him something to occupy his mind and thoughts.

Now, suddenly, there's all this excitement in his life. There is some right-wing media person telling him that the government is in his personal business too much. There are very persuasive big personalities pushing my father's buttons and those of the audience in general. And you know what? That feels good. There is an addictive quality to anger like that. It was exciting for my father. It also provided him a group to belong to.

I believe that a lot of white men feel like, "Well, what am I supposed to do? And who am I?" They needed help in figuring themselves out, and the right-wing media and that world provided it. Too many such men developed a victim mentality, telling themselves, "I'm a victim, I'm mad, I've always wanted to fight back."

How was Fox News and the right-wing media machine able to take people such as your father and get them to a point where they would support a coup or political terrorism or conspiracy theories like QAnon? Were they always prone to such behavior or did Fox News and the right-wing machine make them that way?

On Twitter, a lot people will say to me, usually Democrats or liberals, "Oh, these people, they were always like that. They're just finding a port to park their boat in now." I do not believe that is necessarily true.

My dad hadn't been racist. He hadn't been anti-"illegal immigrant." After listening to Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, he got brainwashed. When I made the documentary, I did not know if I believed in brainwashing. Now I know that brainwashing does exist, it is real.

There's the brainwashing that happens through force, what we were all familiar with from movies. But what Fox News and the larger right-wing are doing is brainwashing by stealth. I believe this to be more insidious. There's only one type of information going into the brain. There's isolation. There is repetition. That is how they brainwash their public.

I feel like there has been a massive brainwashing campaign, something unlike anything we've ever seen before in this country. That's what's happened in America through Fox News and the right-wing media and movement.

Through your website and other outreach, many people have contacted you about how Fox News and the right-wing media machine have impacted their relationships. What are some of the common themes you are seeing?

One of them is anger. The relative, the loved one, the friend, whoever it may be, suddenly is angry more and more, it's their predominant mood. These people also become very argumentative. Many of these people who are watching Fox and are part of the right-wing echo chamber are incapable of having conversations that somehow do not turn to politics. They become obsessed with this new right-wing way of thinking. It becomes the person's mission. It is all of who they are.

What are some personal stories that jump out at you?

A woman recently shared with me how her husband was a good, sweet guy and a really quiet person. Right before Trump ran for office and became president, he started watching Fox News and his personality completely changed. He would yell at her and their child more. He would criticize her, his wife, because she was a Democrat, yell at her, yell at her kid, start criticizing her. The husband was becoming emotionally abusive.

The woman who reached out to me was afraid that it was going to traumatize her child and that she might have to leave her husband. She was really sad about it because she had once been very much in love with him.

Another person who contacted me lost several members of her family to COVID. Her father still wouldn't get the vaccine. He got COVID, and still wouldn't get the vaccine — or said he wouldn't — and he died because Tucker Carlson and other people on Fox News were telling people like him not to get vaccinated.

What is going on, emotionally and cognitively, where someone would listen to a person on TV who is telling them to do things that will cause them personal harm, that will hurt their family members, friends and other people they care about?

They're not thinking rationally. The part of their brain called the amygdala has been hijacked. That is the fight-or-flight part of the brain. When it is activated, the cerebral cortex is not functioning 100 percent. These people are responding from panic. In that moment, they go to the source that they have learned to trust. That source, in this case Fox News, is telling them, "You can only trust us." That source is angry all the time. It tells its public that the government has screwed them over and the politicians that have screwed them over. The response to Fox News and the right-wing machine actually becomes something physiological.

How does Fox News make friends with its viewers? Because what Fox News and other right-wing propaganda outlets are doing on a fundamental level is establishing an intimate relationship with their public.

There is a feeling that there is an in-group and an out-group. Fox and other parts of the right-wing media make their audience feel special, like they are in on something special. It is a very seductive feeling. Being part of a tribe makes people feel safer. That dynamic is also an example of groupthink.

Many Fox viewers and people who consume that right-wing media just want to belong to the group, to think the same way as everyone else in the group. You trust your people. You don't want to doubt them. They are your friends.

Are the people who watch Fox News awake, or are they asleep?

I think they're in a trance. They are definitely not awake. They're almost on autopilot. They are going to accept anything they are told by Fox.

Why would anyone listen to Fox News, or the right-wing echo chamber more generally, telling them to hurt people, to engage in violence? Why would a formerly reasonable person listen to these commands? What has gone wrong with them?

Because they are in such a rage. They are primed to take that next step. They're in such a rage because they believe, in their heart of hearts, that the 2020 election was stolen away from Trump. They really believe that their country is being taken over illegitimately.

Mix that in with the rage that they already have, where for example they truly believe, "Democrats are horrible, they're the devil's spawn. Anything that's wrong in my life is because of them. Now they're stealing the election, they stole my guy who speaks to me, who's like me." They're just ready to fight.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/tech-billionaire-peter-thiel-warns-against-socialism-plans-to-endorse-trump-in-2020

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FOX NATIONPublished September 19, 2019

Tech billionaire Peter Thiel warns against socialism, plans to endorse Trump in 2020

By Yael Halon | Fox News

Get Fox Nation

Tech visionary Peter Thiel warns against socialism, plans to endorse Trump in 2020

Tech visionary Peter Thiel warns against socialism, plans to endorse Trump in 2020

In a new episode of "Uncommon Knowledge," available now on Fox Nation, billionaire Silicon Valley investor and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel sat down with author Peter Robinson to discuss everything from his disdain for politics and the 2020 election, to his thoughts on education and its role in society today.

Commenting on a recent essay he authored in which he referred to politics as a divisive "field of battle," Thiel reiterated his message, calling the political process "deeply adversarial."

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PETER THIEL: SILICON VALLEY CLUELESS ABOUT PATRIOTISM TODAY

"I would like us to be honest about how terrible politics is," he said. "As someone who is generally libertarian, I would like to live in a world that is less conflict, less politics."

Peter Thiel accuses Google of working with China, not US militaryVideo

"I think we must always resist this naive form of politics," Thiel continued, "that politics is just this mechanistic process where we take a poll and we get to some syrupy answer that everyone can agree with...that's not what politics is about at all," he said.

With that said, Thiel plans to endorse Trump in 2020, he explained, and issued particular warnings against 2020 Democrats Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders — both of whom are running on a socialist platform.

EXCLUSIVE: PETER THIEL TALKS TO TUCKER CARLSON

"I think the president will get reelected...but the socialists are not to be underestimated," saidThiel, expressing concern over low-interest rates that could potentially lead to a "redistribution of capital."

"It doesn't mean that zero percent interest rates lead directly to socialism, but I find the rates alarming as low as they are," he said.

Later in the segment, Thiel shared his perspective on education, encouraging students to drop out of college to pursue a career in science and tech-related industries.

In 2010, the billionaire launched the Thiel Fellowship, offering gifted students a total of $100,000 over two years, as well as guidance and other resources, to drop out of school and pursue other work — such as scientific research, creating a startup, or developing a social movement.

The fellowship's motto: "Some ideas can't wait."

Peter Thiel calls for top universities to lose non-profit status Video

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Asked what advice he'd give to students starting out, Thiel encouraged them to put less of an emphasis on education and "really focus more on the future."

"The reasonable advice I would give my former self 30 years ago would be to think a lot harder about the future. Don't think of education as a substitute to the future — try to think concretely about what you want to do," he said.

To hear Thiel's full remarks, including his perspective on artifical intelligence, religion, philosophy and more, join Fox Nation and watch the full episode of "Uncommon Knowledge," available today.

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP FOR A FOX NATION FREE TRIAL

Fox Nation programs are viewable on-demand and from your mobile device app, but only available only for Fox Nation subscribers. Go to Fox Nation to start a free trial and watch the extensive library from Tomi Lahren, Pete Hegseth, Abby Hornacek, Laura Ingraham, Greg Gutfeld, Judge Andrew Napolitano and many more of your favorite Fox News personalities.

Yael Halon is a reporter for Fox News.

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the fed wacko blog

https://thefederalist.com/2020/08/13/new-paper-confirms-just-how-rigged-higher-education-is-against-the-right/

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https://policyexchange.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Academic-freedom-in-the-UK.pdf

new Paper Confirms Just How Rigged Higher Education Is Against The Right

A devastating new policy report provides data on how conservatives are sidelined in western academia. Now, conservatives have to decide what to do about it.

Sumantra MaitraBy Sumantra Maitra

AUGUST 13, 2020

A U.K. report finds that academia is severely damaged, has become a revolutionary institution within narrow and stifling ideological echo-chamber, and cannot be easily fixed with a simple “self-correction” pushed by market forces. Given how much the game is already rigged, legislation and other external interventions are needed to balance the scale.

The policy paper from Policy Exchange, a London-based think-tank, highlights the major trends in British higher-ed and has implications for similar problems in the United States. The report indicates that, compared to the 1960s when the British higher-ed system was divided between around 35 percent supporting Conservative causes and around 50 percent supporting the Labour Party, academia currently is almost wholly skewed to the left.

Conservative professoriate numbers are often in single digits. In the United States, also, several studies have found results similar to those of a 2018 survey, which found ten times as many Democrat-affiliated professors than Republican-affiliated at the top 60-ranked campuses. Worse, the U.K. paper finds, is that “soft totalitarianism” has increased, ranging fromacademic bullying and campaigns against scholars with unconventional views, to even outright seclusion in certain fields and disciplines.

About only half of academics would feel comfortable sitting next to someone who supported Britain’s right to leave the European Union, for example. Just 37 percent say they would feel comfortable being around someone critical of gender and trans-rights. One-third of academics would not hire a “Vote-Leave” supporter of Brexit.

The report also finds that active discrimination against conservatives happens in hiring, background checks, grant and scholarship applications, and committee memberships. Needless to mention, this is ideological discrimination in its purest form.

Naturally, it has resulted from institutions turning into a leftist fantasy world detached from reality. “Many academics thus choose to self-censor. This is again most marked for those who identify as ‘fairly right’ or ‘right’, 32 percent of whom have refrained from airing views in teaching and research,” the paper concludes.

Professor Matthew Goodwin, author of the best-selling National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy, wrote about the report and gave an example of how conservatives are ostracized in academia. Conservative or nationalist professors not only face massive abuse on social media but also are sidelined in their careers solely for their political views. In real life, writes Goodwin, this means:

…being disinvited from workshops in my core research area;  being asked about my personal political views during interviews for research grants; being asked to account for inviting a conservative onto campus; being accused of ‘going native’ or being an ‘apologist’ for Brexiteers and populists; being made aware that I was considered ‘problematic’; and, more generally, experiencing social ‘distancing’ from colleagues.

Naturally, senior and established academics can better weather such abuse, but junior academics are often sidelined or censored severely. Almost worse, many resort to self-censorship in an effort to preserve their career prospects.

The report argues that legislation is critically important to address issues of balance, establish positions to monitor academic freedom, and make sure that universities address freedom of speech and actual viewpoint diversity, rather than accumulating men and women who look different outwardly but all share the same ideas internally.

The report is important as it provides direct evidence for what most conservatives know to be instinctively true. Some of these issues are exactly similar in the United States, where campus free speech has been an increasingly partisan issue with conservatives trying to restore some semblance of equality in an atmosphere hostile to their views.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education maintains a whole database of how many times speakers have been disinvited on campuses. The University of Chicago is the only major university that has charted principles to defend free speech and freedom of expression on campus. So, while there have been many efforts by university leftists to shore up ethnic and racial diversity, the only diversity that is not visible is one of viewpoint.

Across the Anglosphere, three key issues ail academia. One, since ideological bias skews results, grants and scholarships are not falling sway to normal market conditions. Unfortunately, in this regard, despite much conventional conservative faith in markets, the market alone will not remedy what is wrong with academia. In fact, flawed as the current conditions are, a purely market “solution” would further treat students as consumers, encouraging them to feel even more entitled to whatever they desire from higher education.

Two, experience and history tell us that bureaucracy will do whatever is needed to survive and expand. University bureaucracy is no different and caters more to these entitled groups while expanding and filling their ranks. During the last three decades, administrative growth at universities has eclipsed 200 percent, compared to faculty growth in double digits.

Finally, add to these a very minor but extremely vocal group of activists acting as an ideological vanguard trying to discredit and ostracize opponents and grab power. Combined, these three create a perfect storm.

To defund activists in academia, and to ensure viewpoint diversity, external intervention is needed to enforce appropriate legislation and establish rules. South Dakota‘s new law on campus free speech and viewpoint diversity for public universities is a good model.

Assuredly, there are limits to whether governments can or should intervene. Governments can, however, reset the playground rules. They can, and should, help make universities better and more competitive while ensuring free-speech and viewpoint diversity and a level playing field. If it needs to be a battle of ideas, ideas need to openly compete with each other, without fear of ostracism or overt bullying.

Sumantra Maitra is a doctoral researcher at the University of Nottingham, UK, and a senior contributor to The Federalist. His research is in great power-politics and neorealism. You can find him on Twitter @MrMaitra.

tags:

academic bias academic debate academic freedom Bureaucracy campus activism campus administrators Campus Reform education freedom self-censorship viewpoint discrimination viewpoint diversity

==

ref hr1087

https://sdlegislature.gov/docs/legsession/2019/Bills/HB1087ENR.pdf

https://www.thecollegefix.com/south-dakota-legislature-passes-intellectual-diversity-bill/

The College Fix

Original. Student reported. Your daily dose of Right-minded news and commentary from across the nation

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:{:{Author Discussion on the President and the Media (https://www.c-span.org/video/?468104-6/author-discussion-president-media)Author and ABC News chief legal analyst Dan Abrams; Los Angeles Times…}::{}:

https://www.c-span.org/video/?468104-6/author-discussion-president-media

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liberal profs and media sauter

JANUARY 30, 2020

Author Discussion on the President and the Media

Author and ABC News (https://www.c-span.org/organization/?51557/ABC-News) chief legal analyst Dan Abrams; Los Angeles Times executive editor Norman Pearlstine; and former Fox and CBS News (https://www.c-span.org/organization/?51741/CBS-News) president Van Gordon Sauter (https://www.c-span.org/person/?vansauter)examined the relationship between the executive branch and the media.

}:

=

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/03/30/politics (https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/03/30/politics)

...American professors are overwhelmingly liberal, according to a new report (http://www.bepress.com/forum/vol3/iss1/art2/) on faculty political attitudes.

Previous surveys have reached similar conclusions, but this one suggests that the ideological divide on campuses may be greater than has previously been thought. And the authors of this survey say that their evidence suggests say that conservatives, practicing Christians and women are less likely than others to get faculty jobs at top colleges.

The research, published in The Forum, (http://www.bepress.com/forum/) is being praised as path-breaking by some scholars and as garbage by others. But since the study is being released at a time of heightened debate over charges of classroom bias, the report is likely to be closely examined and critiqued.

The findings are based on a survey of 1,643 faculty members at 183 four-year colleges and universities, and the results were analyzed by three political scientists: StanleyRothman of Smith College, S. Robert Lichter of George Mason University and Neil Nevitte of the University of Toronto. In the abstract to their report, they say that the research "suggests that complaints of ideologically based discrimination in academic advancement deserve serious consideration and further study."

Rosemary G. Feal, executive director of the Modern Language Association, said that the implication that liberal faculty members were keeping conservative scholars out was "rubbish," and said that anyone who has been on dozens of search committees, as she has, knows that. "It boggles my mind the degree to which this is rubbish."

The Findings

Faculty members in the study were asked to place themselves on the political spectrum, and 72 percent identified as liberal while only 15 percent identified as conservative, with the remainder in the middle. The professors were also asked about party affiliation, and here the breakdown was 50 percent Democrats, 11 percent Republicans, and the rest independent and third parties.

The study also broke down the findings by academic discipline, and found that humanities faculty members were the most likely (81 percent) to be liberal. The liberal percentage was at its highest in English literature (88 percent), followed by performing arts and psychology (both 84 percent), fine arts (83 percent), political science (81 percent).

Other fields have more balance. The liberal-conservative split is 61-29 in education, 55-39 in economics, 53-47 in nursing, 51-19 in engineering, and 49-39 in business.

Beyond general political identification, the professors were asked for views on specific issues, and here too, the authors find faculty backing for positions associated with liberal politics. Of professors, 84 percent somewhat or strongly agree that women should have the right to have abortions, and88 percent agree that policies should favor environmental protection even if those policies result in higher prices and fewer jobs.

The report's authors say that their findings suggest a "sharp shift to the left" from earlier studies, which found more ideological balance. But in fact numerous studies have made similar findings (although in many cases less detailed) in recent years.

"The American College Teacher" is a major study by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles that features some questions on politics. The last survey, in 2001, found that 5.3 percent of faculty members were far left, 42.3 percent were liberal, 34.3 percent were middle of the road, 17.7 percent were conservative, and 0.3 percent were far right. Those figures are only marginally different from the previous survey, in 1998.

Unlike the survey released this week, the UCLA survey includes faculty members at community colleges, and those faculty members are more evenly split than their four-year counterparts, with 33.3 percent identifying as liberal, 41.1 percent as middle of the road, and 22 percent as conservative.

The new study published in The Forum also attempts to look at the impact of the ideological split on college faculties.

So the authors devised an "academic achievement index" of  faculty members by looking at such factors as books written, journal articles and service on editorial boards. Then the authors looked at certain factors, such as political views, whether someone was religious (defined as attending services "at least once or twice a month"), and gender. The authors then tracked where scholars ended up to see whether there was a relationship between various factors in their backgrounds and whether they ended up at top colleges.

The authors report that among scholars with equivalent academic achievements, liberals are more likely than conservatives to be at top colleges. The scholars also found a negative correlation for being a practicing Christian to getting positions at top colleges (but not for observant Jews) and for women.

In the conclusion to the report, the authors acknowledge that their findings on possible discrimination against conservatives, Christians and women are "preliminary." But they go on to say that "these results suggest that conservative complaints of the presence and effects of liberal homogeneity in academia deserve to be taken seriously, despite their self-interested quality and the anecdotal nature of the evidence previously presented."

What It All Means

Stephen H. Balch, president of the National Association of Scholars, said that "the big news here is the first social science confirmation of the existence of discrimination in hiring and the personnel process." While previous studies have demonstrated the breadth of liberal support in the academy, he said, they have not made as direct a link to hiring and advancement.

Balch said there is now "very strong evidence" that there is bias in the hiring process against conservatives, whereas before this study, there was just "an enormous amount of anecdotal evidence."

College faculty members and presidents, "given their interest in diversity of all other kinds, and their professed desire to overcome discrimination, need to grapple with this."

Many academic leaders, however, say that the lopsided political identification totals are entirely predictable, and do not indicate discrimination of any kind. Feal, the MLA executive director, said that when humanities professors say that they are liberals, "the majority of us understand it to be not a narrow political ideology, but a conception of the world."

"We profess the liberal arts," she said. "That comes from freedom that we hold as a high value, from the pursuit of the truth, the pursuit of academic freedom, the belief that the learning and teaching of values will make us better citizens."

Prior to coming to the MLA, Feal was a professor and department chair  in modern languages at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and she says that searches never focused on questions of religion or politics. "These things are irrelevant in a search."

"When all was said and done, we had conservative Christians, we had liberal atheists, we had everyone," Feal said.

The study is part of a broader campaign, she said, to question the qualifications and rights of faculty members, especially in the humanities. "This is such a dangerous moment," she said. "We are facing the kind of scrutiny on politics and religion that truly signals danger."

Cary Nelson, author of Manifesto of a Tenured Radical, (http://www.nyupress.org/product_info.php?cPath=12&products_id=547) said that he wasn't surprised that some disciplines were largely liberal. Nelson, an English professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said that in his field, "which has devoted itself significantly to expanding the canon over the last 25 years, it's most likely that the people who are coming into the disciplines are going to have a liberal sentiment rather than a reactionary sentiment."

Nelson said, however, that even if most professors in some fields are liberal, you wouldn't know it from what goes on in classrooms, where he said most scholars are "bloody cowards about letting their politics out." Nelson said that he always tells his students that he is a liberal, and that conservative students will do well in his class as long as they speak up and challenge him.

When it comes to hiring, he says that some departments do engage in "PC hiring," which he defined as the kind of hiring "where a search committee will say, 'We need more women so we're going to give this slot to a woman' or 'We don't have enough gay people so we've got to hire a gay person.' " Nelson said this kind of hiring was wrong -- and foolish in the humanities -- where there is enough diversity in the total pool that "if you go for the very best people, you'll still end up with diversity."

In his department, he said, hiring is quality based, and even though many of his colleagues focus on issues of race and gender, "we hire people who work only on traditional authors, most of whom are dead white men." The question in hiring, he says, is are you excited by a person's work and its potential, not do you agree with it.

In the Minority

Not all scholars accept the premise that the ideological split is necessarily hurting higher education -- or at least not in a black-and-white way.

...

cited by FIRE boys:

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/la-op-shermer-lukianoff14apr14-story.html

Marxist professors or sensitive students?

Today, Shermer and Lukianoffweigh allegations of widespread political bias at American colleges. Later in the week, they'll debate ideological diversity in curricula, lifetime tenure for professors and more.

Faculty bias, by the numbers

By Michael Shermer

Students should complain about professorial indoctrination, because it is real and it is loaded heavily on the left, most notably in the social sciences and the humanities.

A 2005 study by George Mason University economist Daniel Klein found that Democrats outnumbered Republicans among the faculty by a staggering ratio of nearly 10 to 1 at UC Berkeley and 7.6 to 1 at Stanford. Measuring political attitudes through voter registration among faculty in 20 different departments, in the humanities and social sciences the ratio was 16 to 1 at both campuses (30 to 1 among assistant and associate professors), and in some departments, such as anthropology and journalism, there wasn't a single Republican to be found.

Another 2005 study by Stanley Rothman, S. Robert Lichter and Neil Nevitte discovered that only 15% of those teaching at American colleges and universities describe themselves as conservative, while 72% said they were liberal. That figure climbed to 80% in departments such as English literature, philosophy, political science and religious studies, with only 5% labeling themselves as conservative.

The bias exists even in law schools. In a 2005 article in the Georgetown Law Journal, Northwestern University law Professor John McGinnis reviewed the faculties of the top 21 law schools rated by the 2002 U.S. News & World Report graduate school rankings. He found that politically active professors at these top law schools overwhelmingly tend to be Democrats -- 81% contributed "wholly or predominantly" to Democratic campaigns while just 15% did the same for Republicans.

Given this reality, is it any wonder the academy has the reputation of being a bastion for bleeding-heart liberals? Unless they are openly teaching a course entitled, in effect, "Why Liberals Should Rule the World," professors have no business introducing their political bias to students. Their job is to teach the curriculum of their subject, not churn out a bunch of Marx-worshiping, Bush-hating, Che Guevara-loving, pinko graduates who will go out into the world woefully ignorant that most Americans think entirely differently from the way they do.

As for those mamby-pamby professors who whine about students who have the audacity to tell people on the outside what is actually going on in American classrooms, now you know what it's like to be in the real world where consumers are bosses and producers take orders. You've got the cushiest job on the planet, so buck up and take a little criticism like the rest of us have to on Planet Reality. Professors are like cloistered monks who spend their entire lives protected from the buffeting of the marketplace of ideas, where the rest of us work. Think about it: K-12, four years of undergraduate schooling, four to six years of graduate education, maybe a post-doctoral appointment or two, then assistant professor, associate professor, and finally full professor with tenure. It's womb-to-tomb socialized security. No wonder professors are paranoid about public disclosure of their work.

But thanks to the Internet, the gig is up!

Michael Shermer is the publisher of Skeptic magazine (skeptic.com), a monthly columnist for Scientific American, an adjunct professor in the School of Economics and Politics at Claremont Graduate University and the author of 10 books.

Being offended vs. being indoctrinated

By Greg Lukianoff

Hello Michael,

I think you make a lot of important points in your post, but you tend to conflate the evidence of bias in academia with indoctrination. A better statistic can be found in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education-Gallup Poll. According to this poll, 29% of 25- to 34-year-olds, 41% of 45- and 54-year-olds, and 60% of those over age 65 responded that professors "often" use their classrooms to espouse their own political views. Whether the real number is closer to 29% or 60%, these are powerful statistics when you are dealing with millions of students.

But is having an opinionated professor really the same as indoctrination? I have seen claims -- often from conservative students -- that students have a right not to be "harassed" by the left-leaning opinions of their professors. This drives me nuts because if there is one thing conservatives should not be doing, it is legitimizing the idea that merely being exposed to different points of view is the same thing as harassment. Harassment rationales are used to shut down people with dissenting opinions (often the socially conservative, the un-PC, or the merely unlucky) far too often.

Certainly, there are gross abuses committed by university professors against the right of private conscience of their students. California had one spectacular example back in 2003, when an adjunct professor at Citrus College gave an extra-credit assignment in which students had to write and mail letters to President Bush (pdf) opposing the Iraq war. Students were not allowed to take any other stance. This was wrong on multiple levels: It was an abuse of power, it was coerced speech, and it was arguably indoctrination.

I must emphasize, however, that the worst abuses are not coming from the professoriate; they are coming from the ever-expanding army of college administrators. One recent ghastly example that received woefully inadequate press attention was a true thought reform program at the University of Delaware. In this program, all 7,000 residents of the university's dormitories were required to attend coercive and unabashedly ideological "treatments" (the actual term administrators used) with the explicit goal of getting students to adopt specific points of view with regard to issues such as morality, environmentalism and sexuality. Resident assistants were required to give students questionnaires on what races and genders they would date with the goal of getting students to be more open to dating other races or genders. One student, who in one of these exceedingly creepy "one on one" sessions answered "none of your damn business" to the question "When did you discover your sexual identity?" was written up by an RA and reported to the administration (pdf). That's only the tip of the iceberg and, shockingly, the Residence Life program at the University of Delaware still seems to believe this was a good program. It is chilling that we are raising a generation of citizens who believe it is their right to mandate the appropriate views that other citizens should have. It's a formula for totalitarianism.

You really must check out some of these other programs, too, Michael. The Michigan State University "Student Accountability in Community" punishment system is equally terrifying, as it required students who demonstrated aggressiveness (one example given was a girl who slammed a door in a fight with her boyfriend) to sit down for four mandatory sessions with a pseudo-psychologist in order to make them speak "correctly" about what they had supposedly done wrong. No wonder students over the last two decades have come to believe that they have the right to destroy -- and in some cases even burn -- student newspapers that have opinions they dislike. I shudder for the republic if the next generation of leaders brings such fundamentally anti-democratic thinking to America's institutions of power.

Greg Lukianoff is a constitutional lawyer and the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (thefire.org). He is a frequent guest on national TV news programs and a blogger at the Huffington Post.

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Vanishing Conservative—Is There a Glass Ceiling? (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237418643_The_Vanishing_Conservative-Is_There_a_Glass_Ceiling)

Article (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237418643_The_Vanishing_Conservative-Is_There_a_Glass_Ceiling)

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(https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/20856203_Stanley_Rothman)

Stanley Rothman}:

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Robert Lichter (https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Robert_Lichter)=

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The radical personality: Social psychological correlates of new left ideology (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/226630815_The_radical_personality_Social_psychological_correlates_of_new_left_ideology)

Article (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/226630815_The_radical_personality_Social_psychological_correlates_of_new_left_ideology)

Sep 1982   

Political Behavior

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(https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Robert_Lichter)

Robert Lichter}:

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(https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/20856203_Stanley_Rothman)

Stanley Rothman}:

-

This paper describes and tests a model of radical personality based upon social psychological correlates of New Left ideology. Following methodological criticism of studies that portrayed radicals as psychologically liberated, a model of psychopolitical rebellion is described as an inverted form of authoritarian personality. This model was ..

The Vanishing Conservative—Is There a Glass Ceiling? (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237418643_The_Vanishing_Conservative-Is_There_a_Glass_Ceiling)

Article (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237418643_The_Vanishing_Conservative-Is_There_a_Glass_Ceiling)

:{:{}:

(https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/20856203_Stanley_Rothman)

Stanley Rothman}:

:{:{}:

(https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Robert_Lichter)

Robert Lichter}:

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ben s rANKS HIGH GGL

Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America's Youth (review)

Evan Baum (https://muse.jhu.edu/search?action=search&query=author:Evan%20Baum:and&min=1&max=10&t=query_term), Laura W. Perna (https://muse.jhu.edu/search?action=search&query=author:Laura%20W.%20Perna:and&min=1&max=10&t=query_term)

The Review of Higher Education (https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/172)

Johns Hopkins University Press (https://muse.jhu.edu/search?action=browse&limit=publisher_id:1)

Volume 28, Number 3, Spring 2005 (https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/9652)

pp. 423-425

10.1353/rhe.2005.0004 (https://doi.org/10.1353/rhe.2005.0004)

REVIEW

View Citation (https://muse.jhu.edu/view_citations?type=%20article&id=179941)

Additional Information (https://muse.jhu.edu/article/179941/summary#info_wrap)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:

Evan Baum (bio) and Laura Perna (bio)

Ben Shapiro. Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America's Youth. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2004. 256 pp. Cloth: $22.99. ISBN: 0-78526-1486.

In the words of the author, Brainwashed is meant to "rip the cover off of [sic] a system that for too long has claimed diplomatic immunity while simultaneously feeding students a steady diet of leftism" (p. xviii). Underneath the poorly written substance of the book, much of which seems to be a personal vendetta against UCLA Professor Robert Watson, is a devout hatred of higher education that typifies the arguments of such [End Page 423] neo-conservatives as Dinesh D'Souza, Diane Ravitch, and David Horowitz. A recent graduate of UCLA, 20-year old Ben Shapiro is a nationally syndicated columnist with Creators Syndicate, an international distributor of features to newspapers and internet sites. He is perhaps best known for his conservative and controversial columns in UCLA's Daily Bruin and the social lore surrounding his dismissal from the paper, the focus of Chapter 11.

Shapiro's central thesis is that the academy is overwhelmingly comprised of people who are anti-Republican, anti-Israel, and anti-American, against capitalism, religion, war, and God, while being pro-Democrat, pro-Islam, and pro-Iraq, in favor of socialism and communism, affirmative action and multiculturalism, homosexuality, abortion, euthanasia, radical environmentalism, and moral relativism. Despite the book's title, the text is often more an indictment of social policy and liberal ideology than an attack on higher education. Shapiro organizes his discussion of these themes into 12 chapters and concludes by outlining recommendations for conservatives in a brief (six-page) chapter entitled "Solutions."

A critique of his arguments is warranted, at least in part, by the fervor underlying his categorization of the typical American faculty member. The book has serious methodological limitations, as the author consistently provides no, incomplete, or biased support for his assertions. To "document" the ways in which the academy brainwashes students, Shapiro relies on one-sentence quotations from faculty members without providing any additional information, including the extent to which one faculty's view was representative of all faculty, whether the statement was related to the faculty's area of expertise, whether it was based on any research, or whether it had instructional purposes beyond indoctrination. Shapiro also inappropriately generalizes from his experiences at UCLA to the experiences of all students at all institutions. When included, sources supporting his perspective are drawn from conservative organizations, talk radio, and online reactionary media outlets. The irony in Shapiro's presentation is that, while his concluding recommendation to students is, "Please, think for yourselves" (p. 182), his own conservative brainwashing seems little different from the left-wing version he so vigorously opposes.

It is tempting to critique the book line-by-line, not only because of the methodological flaws but also because of the pervasiveness of inflammatory language. Two of the more outrageous examples are: "Many professors excuse and even encourage pedophilia" (p. 62) and "Professors are willing to go out on a limb to kill babies" (p. 95). We stopped counting the number of times that he used the word "idiot."

The general style and structure of the argument may be illustrated by a representative example. In Chapter 2, "Partisan Politics," Shapiro summarizes opposition to legislation that he favors, the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, by stating that professors advocate for a "big, expensive, useless form of welfare that keeps teen pregnancy high, work ethic low, and the upper class paying massive taxes" (p. 13). He then quotes Professor Shelia Kamerman of Columbia University: "There is a fantasy that these changes are going to significantly reduce out-of-wedlock childbirth and teenage pregnancy. But very little attention is being paid to the consequences for the children" (p. 13). Shapiro fails to mention that Dr. Kamerman is the Compton Foundation Centennial Professor of Social Work and a nationally and internationally recognized expert on child and family policy. He also does not critique the basis for her statement but trivializes it: "Kamerman knows the trick: When you have no grounds for a real argument, weep for...

...

==

https://theconversation.com/does-college-turn-people-into-liberals-90905

oes going to college make students into political liberals (https://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-mooney/does-college-make-you-lib_b_1312889.html)?

Conservative activists have claimed that universities brainwash students and indoctrinate (https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/brainwashed-ben-shapiro/1100329831#/)them into believing a liberal ideology. The line of reasoning goes like this: Liberal college professors tell students “what to think,” and “what to think” is that conservatives and their positions are to be dismissed. A state lawmaker in Iowa (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2017/02/22/an-iowa-republican-wants-universities-to-ask-prospective-professors-how-would-you-vote) has even suggested universities consider political affiliation in connection with hiring practices in order to balance out the distribution of political representation on the faculty.

Conservatives on campus feel outnumbered, given that about 60 percent of faculty (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/01/11/the-dramatic-shift-among-college-professors-thats-hurting-students-education) identify (https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/content/professors-and-their-politics) as politically liberal (http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-gross-academia-conservatives-hiring-20160520-snap-story.html). This imbalance supposedly hurts research (https://nypost.com/2014/10/12/liberal-bias-in-academia-is-destroying-the-integrity-of-research/), stifles open discourse (http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2016/12/20/liberal-professors/) and impairs overall education (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/01/11/the-dramatic-shift-among-college-professors-thats-hurting-students-education/?utm_term=.690e3fd9c364). Missing in this debate, however, is large-scale empirical evidence on how going to college actually impacts students’ attitudes.

Our findings

We are a group of academics interested in understanding how people of different religious, political and philosophical views interact. We are gathering data in a national study of college students called IDEALS (https://www.ifyc.org/IDEALS).

Although we have partnered with the Interfaith Youth Core, a Chicago-based national nonprofit (http://990s.foundationcenter.org/990_pdf_archive/300/300212534/300212534_201607_990.pdf) that partners with colleges and universities to promote interfaith cooperation, our work in this area predates (https://www.ifyc.org/ideals/history) the organization and serves as the basis (https://www.ifyc.org/ideals/history) for the current IDEALS project.

The IDEALS study started following (https://www.ifyc.org/ideals/history) students when they entered college in 2015. Data on many topics, including tracking how students’ attitudes toward liberals and conservatives changed, were then gathered from the same students during their second year of college.

We measured how students viewed each political group separately along four dimensions. Specifically, we asked respondents the extent to which they thought liberals and conservatives were ethical, made positive contributions to society, and were people the student had something in common with. We also asked students if they had a positive attitude toward each group. The same questions were asked at the beginning of each student’s freshman and sophomore years.

These four attitudes are a great place to start gathering empirical support to test whether colleges are turning students against conservatives. If faculty were “telling students what to think” and students were internalizing these ideas, we’d expect to see evidence during the students’ impressionable first year.

Gains across the spectrum

The result (https://www.ifyc.org/ideals/firstyear)? In our nationally representative sample (https://www.ifyc.org/IDEALS/information) of over 7,000 undergraduates at more than 120 colleges (https://www.ifyc.org/sites/default/files/resources/IDEALSparticipants.pdf) who answered both the first-year and sophomore questionnaire, students did demonstrate an increase in appreciative attitudes toward liberals after a year of schooling.

Among all students, 48 percent viewed liberals more favorably in their second year of college than when they arrived on campus. However, among the same students, 50 percent also viewed conservatives more favorably. In other words, college attendance is associated, on average, with gains in appreciating political viewpoints across the spectrum, not just favoring liberals.

The data show 31 percent of students did develop more negative attitudes toward conservatives. However, just about the same amount, 30 percent, developed more negative attitudes toward liberals.

Moreover, the data show us that the most growth in appreciation happened among people who were initially least appreciative of either liberals or conservatives. In simple terms, first-year students who begin college really disliking liberals or conservatives have their attitudes soften in college.

Turning to institutional type, students who attend a private college had a higher initial appreciative rating of liberals than their counterparts at public universities. However, overall views changed at both private and public colleges in the same way. Appreciative attitudes toward conservatives increased between the first and second year of college at both private and public to approximately the same degree.

Also, students trend toward appreciating liberal ideologies – both when they first come to college and after their first year. So, while students still favor liberal ideologies over conservative ones, this gap does not widen over the first year. ...Why? We don’t know the answer. However, our best guess is this finding might ultimately have little to do with faculty directly and instead relate to the climate that campuses strive to create for the expression of diverse viewpoints, political and otherwise. While students may come to college never having met someone on the political “other side,” it is hard to avoid doing so in college. One central aim of higher education is to encourage contact, debate, discussion and exposure to persuasion from different kinds of people.

After a year of college, in other words, it might be more challenging for students to brand all liberals or conservatives as wrongheaded when they are studying, eating and learning alongside them. These experiences might even help students appreciate others as people with diverse histories and shared interests in working toward common goals.

One takeaway is clear: It appears as though the first year of college is doing what it should, exposing students to experiences that teach them how to think rather than what to think.   endit1

Political views

https://theconversation.com/topics/liberals-36271