You know, I’m just doing my thing. I wasn’t hurting anyone. But they were putting people in jail for years, making it dangerous to buy. Why? The constitutional conservatives supported decriminalization, so I was with them.
After all, you can’t get more constitutional than weed. I mean, they all grew hemp. Madison, Jefferson, Lincoln, all those guys. George Washington’s wig? Made of hemp. I’m serious—weed’s as American as apple pie!
* * *
Brad Fields (Insurance Salesman)
Sure, I fired up a fattie or two in school. Everyone did. And if letting the stoners get stoned—which they were doing already—was all it took to get a bunch of libertarians fighting beside us for the freedoms the liberals wanted to take, I was like, “Go ahead and inhale!”
* * *
Tamara Hayes Smith (Professor/Activist)
It was tough. There is always a tension between the pragmatic and the principled, but at a certain point the choice becomes whether or not a given hill is worth dying on. Conservatives faced the question of whether making sure pot smokers couldn’t legally buy the pot that they were already buying was worth risking the entire republic. And the answer was no.
Chapter Eleven: Target Academia
“Nothing Is More Conservative Than a Liberal Faculty”
Academia was key high ground for the insurgency. Not only did it have enormous prestige that progressives could harness to gain support for their plans, but it provided progressives a perfect venue for indoctrination. The constitutional conservatives found it an irresistible target as their power—and academia’s arrogance—grew.
* * *
David Chang (Conservative Media Host)
The controversial Chang makes it a point to mention his Ivy League credentials not so much for the sake of vanity but because it emphasizes his rejection of the values and beliefs his professors tried to inculcate in him. “I came from the belly of the beast,” he says. “I experienced the best they had and rejected it.”
On his shows, particularly in the early years, academic antics were a staple of his commentary. “The universities are supposed to preserve and defend our culture, and I was appalled by what they chose to preserve and defend.”
You could always count on filling a couple hours a week with the progressive nonsense at some college somewhere. They thought they were safe in their little academic bubble, and that no one would know what they were doing. Wrong!
I loved to shine a spotlight on them and catch them in the act enforcing some idiotic feminist speech code or having some sort of weird sex festival for freshmen. But what started happening is that normal people began wondering why they were getting taxed for this kind of crap—much less paying six figures for their kids to go to a traditional university, when they could get a real education via the web for a fraction of the price with no nonsense.
As constitutional conservatives, we began to realize that the entire higher education system was a giant scam designed to take money from people who contribute to society and transfer it to layabout academics and their enablers while simultaneously indoctrinating our young people in the precepts of collectivism. And in the Obama years, there was a “higher education bubble”—a law professor named Glenn Reynolds, who had a very popular site called Instapundit, coined that term. Well, by the 2010s, the bubble was already popping.
We started to identify academia, as it was then structured, as what it was—an enemy. Then we needed to move swiftly and mercilessly to assist the natural processes of the market in changing it into something that would not only be useful to society again but that was no longer a subsidized petri dish for the virus of progressivism.
The higher education scam—well, it was technically more of a racket—was actually kind of brilliant in a sinister way. The higher education establishment built its success on two pillars, both of which have crumbled over the last 30 years.
The first was the ridiculous notion that everyone could and should go to college. No, everyone couldn’t and everyone shouldn’t. Most people shouldn’t go to college, at least as it was commonly understood back then. Then, it was a four- to six-year time-out from life, with giant lecture hall classes and not much in the way of relevant learning, all for incredible amounts of money. And the focus was on having had the experience—of walking out with the diploma—rather than actual learning. Some schools even gave up on grades—it was simply enough to have been accepted as a high schooler. Four years later you got a piece of paper and no one checked or cared whether you actually learned anything.
If we had had a K-12 educational system whose purpose was to educate kids to a decent level instead of to provide jobs for teachers and administrative parasites, most people would have walked out of high school with the kind of core competency required to be a valuable citizen. As it was then, many of our “colleges” were devoted to teaching students the things they should have learned in high school.
We did not have “higher” education; we mostly just had “longer” education.
The false notion that everyone should go to college created an artificial need for colleges. Look at the vast array of so-called colleges that was out there then, including community colleges. We had to face facts—most students at these institutions didn’t need any more school. They needed to get their asses to work.
So, you got young people who weren’t really focused on—or good at—academic work taking valuable time out of their lives to struggle through basic courses that added zero value to their marketability. Worse, they were taking on debt to do it. And staying in school longer meant delaying adulthood—that and marriage penalties in law helped lead to extended adolescent periods that we had never seen before in our society.
We finally just cut the baloney about expanding minds and growing as individuals and all that crap—the college scam was a full employment program for a liberal educator class who made their living pretending to educate students who, in return, pretended to learn.
The so-called prestige institutions were little better, dominated by phony majors and nonsense courses, with ever-dropping standards that ensured that something like half the students had an “A” average if their school bothered giving grades at all.
People—parents paying the bills, employers hiring these grads, and even the students themselves—started realizing that when everyone is outstanding, no one is.
This whole apparatus was funded by the government through student loans that could either never be repaid or anchored the graduates (assuming they ever graduated, which a high proportion did not) in debt for decades. And for what? At the crappy schools, the diplomas meant nothing, and at the good ones, they were usually just a souvenir of a four-year vacation full of cheap beer and cheesy sexual experimentation—with a $350,000 price tag.
This couldn’t go on and it didn’t. The cost to support this bloated pyramid scheme was rising too fast while the peasants were revolting at the sticker shock. College just cost too much, and people began to realize that they simply were not getting value for the money. Further, technology was making the old model of having some tenured jerk droning on to an auditorium of hungover sophomores a thing of the past. Why spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to live in residence at Deadend State when you could go online and get a Science 101 lecture from a Nobel Prize winner for free?
In the end, it was pretty clear that the real product these schools were selling was a diploma. When the high-prestige schools figured out how to credential students online, and that became widely accepted, it was adios academia as we knew it. The low-end schools just couldn’t compete, and the high-end ones had to change to meet the realities of cost and new technology. The traditional university model of a few decades ago is a specialty model now—most college courses are online and 90 percent of students are nonresidents, living real lives and fitting in education around careers.
Politically, academia was a festering boil of progressivism that had to be lanced. We were always focused on the culture,
and academia was a huge component of that. Protected from accountability by tenure and the unearned prestige of their positions, academics turned the “best” schools in the country into training grounds for little liberal fascists, ruthlessly enforcing their own creepy little police states of politically correct oppression. Nothing is more conservative than a liberal faculty, and they tried to resist but their old model of a university was dying.
It was time to kick them when they were down.
First, conservatives fought the idea that every kid needs to go to college. This was a very tough sell with the middle class, particularly because they had been used to seeing a university education as a ticket upwards for their children. But now they were seeing the opposite with their own eyes—their kids were coming home with their bags and a diploma, smothered in debt, unable to find decent work in the Obama/Clinton economy.
With money tight and prices astronomical, parents were a bit more open to the idea that their kid might be better off being a plumber instead of getting a degree in contemporary feminist theater and fixing artisanal coffee drinks for the rest of his life.
Conservatives supported trade schools in high schools—if you were a certified electric vehicle technician, you couldn’t not get a job. Now, this ran up against the teachers unions and the campaigns to centralize education standards like the failed Common Core program Obama and a bunch of squishy Republicans tried to foist on the country during the teens. This old guard wanted to retain the old, failed model—too many Democratic constituents in the teachers unions were too invested in it to let there be reform without a fight.
It was in the red states where constitutional conservative governors and legislators started making the real changes. Of course, the biggest and most important change was outlawing public employee unions. When the teachers unions started to go away, then the biggest obstacle to real education reform was gone.
We backed other key reforms too. At the university level, we first started linking student loans to majors, at least until we could eliminate government loans and grants entirely.
If you wanted to be physics major, sure, here was your loan at 5 percent. There was a place for physics majors in society. But if you wanted to major in the ethnomusicology of Angola? Awesome. Live your dream. The interest rate was 12 percent because, well, your dream was stupid and there was no good reason the rest of us had to pay a dime to help you achieve it.
Interested in majoring in sociology? I think we charged 22 percent! It was even more useless. The same with any kind of racial, ethnic, gender, or sexual preference “studies.” Those idiotic, pseudomajors actually made America a worse place. The academics, of course, went nuts. It was delightful.
And no loans for law school. We had too damn many lawyers already.
Of course, the variable student loan rates were only an interim step. The Constitution says nothing about subsidizing people’s higher education, and the program was simply a stealth subsidy for a Democratic constituency anyway. We ended the government student loan program completely in 2030, and while fewer people graduate from college today, employers have responded by not demanding a degree where the position really doesn’t require one.
Oh, there are still private student loans you can get from private companies, but they are not government subsidized or government backed. And they are not exempt from being discharged in bankruptcy. That’s why lenders are very careful about their loans these day.
The sell got easier over time as people changed their views about higher education. We asked, “Why should we subsidize nonsense?” We let the Democrats explain why some mom working 50 hours a week then having to take care of her kids should pay taxes to let some jerk get a performance art degree from Princeton.
Sure, there were some real majors, and science training was and is important, but those weren’t the issue and those weren’t the problem. We all knew the problem because we all saw it when we went to school. The academic elite was unaccountable, untouchable, and always greedy for more.
We conservatives decided to crush it.
We hit them in the pocketbook, where it hurt. Some of the institutions had ungodly amounts of cash squirreled away, like my own alma mater Harvard, yet they let Uncle Sucker keep picking up the tab. We started requiring them to pay out a minimum of 10 percent of their endowment annually to be eligible for any federal aid of any kind and to remain tax-free. You would have thought we were killing puppies on the library steps!
Our goal? Shrink the liberal industrial complex by getting rid of marginal, bogus schools that served no purpose other than to employ its left-wing employees. This made sense fiscally, policy-wise, and it supported our effort to eliminate progressivism as a viable alternative to conservatism.
Oh, let’s be clear. Hastening the destruction of academia as it used to be was not just about education policy. We learned from liberals—destroy your enemies by doing whatever it took. Academia was perhaps the most solid base of progressivism in the culture. Academia had ruthlessly purged any conservative elements from its ranks. We needed to be just as ruthless. A bunch of otherwise marginally employable losers, called “academics,” somehow managed to get themselves permanent gigs at society’s expense and use it as a base to wreck society. We needed to go after them.
In the states we controlled, we eliminated tenure—just ended it outright. We called it what it was—an accountability measure. Later, at the federal level, we linked interim student loan funding to “tenure reform.” If you wanted your professors untouchable, you didn’t get to touch our money. The universities folded.
But even as we helped the market break up academia, we attacked their reign of campus terror. We were especially effective at the state level where we controlled the legislatures.
We strengthened discrimination laws to expressly cover political viewpoints, and then we helped conservatives shut out of academia to sue. There was nothing that got the attention of an administrator like getting served with a lawsuit. It was all progressive fun and games until someone was handed a subpoena to a deposition to explain why there were 58 Democrats in the English Department and zero Republicans. Boy, it was fun watching them try to explain that.
We pushed free speech laws that barred the academic fascists from harassing and silencing people simply for expressing their conservative beliefs. We made the liberals show that they were the party of repression and censorship by opposing these commonsense reforms.
Oh, and we mandated equal funding for student organizations. When I was in school, it was a constant battle for our conservative paper to get funded, though the Marxist ones (including ones run by nonstudents!) always got a boatload of cash. And we got conservative rich guys to throw a few bucks at some underemployed young conservative lawyers to fund the cases.
Administrators would always, always do the easiest thing. The easiest thing had been buckling under to the faculty fascists. But when we got some lawyers involved, we would watch those administrators get super-duper concerned about things like free speech, nondiscrimination, and due process.
There is still a place for academia in America, of course. Except today it is a smaller place for fewer people, but with much more rigorous standards and a true dedication to knowledge and free inquiry. Yesterday, it was a racket and a joke, and it was ruining young lives with debt incurred earning useless degrees in silly subjects. Today it adds value to society—and conservatives are free to participate in it again.
Academia made us its enemy. We had no second thoughts when we helped the market ruthlessly reform it. Academia as we knew it was doomed anyway by economics and technology. We constitutional conservatives simply helped hasten its death and rebirth.
And we smiled as we did.
* * *
Ted Jindal (Technology Consultant)
As a UC Berkeley graduate (class of 2010), Jindal certainly has impressive academic credentials. However, even though he is the owner of a multimillion-dollar technology company, he is critical of the
academic world that he came from.
My computer science degree was useful to me. It helped me do my actual work—you can’t say that about people like my roommate in the dorms. He was a sociology major, and last I heard he was a waiter at a steakhouse in Long Beach.
Technology changed the nature of college. These professors had been teaching the same way for centuries; then suddenly their whole world was turned upside down. What was the advantage of sitting in a giant hall with 500 other sophomores to hear some famous professor if you could do it in your house, at a time you chose, for a hundredth the cost—and rewind it if you missed something? Suddenly, these academic superstores became totally fungible.
Technology was going to force change regardless, but the arrogance of academia took away any incentive to provide them a soft landing. The old university model made its bed, and it died in it.
* * *
Delbert Windbridge (Liberal Professor)
Professor Windbridge of Duke University has the reputation of being an unhappy man. A staunch liberal, he joined the English Department in 2012 as a graduate student largely on the strength of his paper, The Song of the Phallus: Gender Identity Issues in Fifties Television Situation Comedy.
He was well known for packing auditoriums during his first two decades at the school with notoriously easy courses that included viewings of such vintage television programs as Leave It to Beaver and Three’s Company, followed by what the syllabus described as “an analysis from a Marxist, feminist, and genderqueered perspective.”
In 2017, a conservative student’s covert cell phone video of him went viral, getting over three million views. It showed him spending 15 tearful minutes apologizing to one of his sociology classes for “being an unconscious participant in the calculated system of male patriarchal, heteronormative oppression” and, specifically, “for this accursed penis I must bear.” After being auto tuned and remixed by an enterprising DJ in Dubrovnik, a version of the rant, entitled “Accursed Penis,” backed by heavy bass and drums, became a minor dance club hit, reaching number four on the Serbo-Croatian music charts.
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