Peter Wood: Defund Colleges, Not Cops

Police Are Not The Root Of Our Problems; Academia Is.

   I'm rather sympathetic with this line. Universities seem to rarely even strive for institutional neutrality with respect to contemporary politics. In fact, they often openly and enthusiastically reject it (as a prominent part of my own university did recently in an open letter.) They seem to more-or-less openly propagandize for the left. Prominent in the anti-rationalist worldview of the pomo left is the view that objectivity is impossible--and that the rhetoric of objectivity is a method of oppression, used to denigrate leftists positions and arguments. Basically because: so many of them are logically indefensible or outright self-contradictory. So...give them up? Ha! No way, bigot! Give up logic instead! At any rate, rejecting the idea of objectivity is a way to reject the distinction between education and brainwashing. And that's a way to quell the pangs of intellectual conscience of the leftist propagandist...

   At any rate: universities now pour out anti-American, anti-Western, anti-Enlightenment, anti-liberal propaganda. In large part they aim to weaken the country--which is a rational response to believing that the country is awful. Liberals and conservatives fight with the gloves on, because their principles debar them from propagandizing--they see education as a means to truth and rationality, which are good in themselves. They violate their own principles if they corrupt education for what they see as base political purposes. Some do it nevertheless--but for them at least it's a bug and not a feature. More precisely: it's a violation of principle, not an ideal. Anti-liberal leftists typically don't believe in truth and rationality, but, rather, see everything as, ultimately, a political power struggle--that they must win. By any means necessary. 

   So, as we, as a nation, fight to move forward, hoping to survive and prosper in a future that we only dimly perceive, we are supporting massive, fabulously expensive, prestigious, and influential institutions that have as one of their main goals: our destruction. That is: the destruction of the world's most important  liberal, constitutional, democratic republic. And its replacement with a tribal, antirational, antiliberal, probably socialist regime the further details of which are TBD.

   That's a simplification--to some extent a cartoon. But there is, so far as I can tell, a hell of a lot of truth in it. It's a damn sight closer to being true than any of us should be comfortable with.

   Standard qualification: many or most of the foot soldiers in this war don't really understand the cause for which they fight. They've been indoctrinated in graduate school to accept a bunch of arguments and ideas that most of them see as bravely critical of a violent and hegemonic USA, West, etc. They see themselves as bravely and honestly opposing tyranny and criticizing an extremely flawed status quo. And there's some truth in that as well--no one thinks that the USA or the West have approached moral optimality. Legitimate criticisms are used as springboards--but one of their goals is destruction of a nation and a civilization that are, in actual fact, humanity's best hopes. Or at least: damn near to it. The BLM riots are an instructive microcosm. The killing of George Floyd was real and it was awful. But there is no rational route from that incident to rioting and burning and killing and demanding a nutty reordering of society aiming to move it toward an anti-liberal ideal. To get from this particular point A to this particular point B, you have to add lies and propaganda and a deranged worldview produced by decades of brainwashing by universities, publishing, news media, and so on. But especially universities. Which is possible because the long march through the institutions has paid off.

   And again: some of that is undoubtedly wrong, e.g. overstated. That's just the way of such things. I'm not aiming for perfect accuracy, and I'm happy to admit error even before I know which parts are erroneous. The point is, for your consideration: if I could figure out a way to bet on the above being way, way more true than we would like, I would do so. That worries me. A lot. Maybe you think I'm a nut. But if you don't, it might ought to worry you, too.