by Michael Robillard and Timothy Gordon
Recently, a number of medical schools have joined the anti-European, anti-Christian, pro-Marxist woke bandwagon. According to physicist Lawrence Krauss, “the American Association of Medical Colleges has approved a Diversity-Equity-Inclusion based curriculum, which the AAMC Council of Deans Chair says is as important as teaching the latest scientific breakthroughs.”
Meanwhile, our military leadership continues to push incoherent gender ideology upon a captive audience of young soldiers, sailors, and airmen. And justices at the heights of our judiciary system, because of political correctness, dare not even define the word woman.
In response to these instances and instances like them within the present culture war, conservatives have offered much-needed criticism within the domains of news media, entertainment, government, and law. While these battles are necessary, of course, they have been largely impotent against the omnipresent spread of leftist ideas. This is so because conservatives consistently miss the mark when it comes acknowledging the true root cause of such radicalism: the ivory tower.
For some time now, American patriots have committed the grave mistake of overlooking the extreme aggregated impact of subversive, far-Left academics; individual rogue neurons in the cultural nerve center who have produced so much suffering in our body politic. The hypothetical, one-sided thought-experiments and hot-air pseudo-philosophies cooked up at run-of-the-mill liberal arts colleges across the nation have achieved the desired effect on all the cultural institutions downstream from the academy: complete destabilization and disintegration. From law and medicine to religion, government, media, and even to language itself (ze? zir?), the bottom has fallen out and the center cannot hold.
Conservatives can no longer afford to shrug off academy-bred, society-wide intellectual sepsis, as if what happens in academia stays in academia. It’s not true; the effete eccentrics and dangerous, sandal-clad subversives at the fringes of the sociology and lit crit departments have exercised maximum influence over our shared institutions and overall culture, and all for the negative. Conservative nonchalance in the face of intellectually weaponized neuropathy has now come home to roost.
Consider some of the slightly older gems of the intelligentsia, first conceived by academics (especially legal academics) over the past three-quarters of a century: a constitutional right to pornography, to contraception, to sodomy, to gay marriage, to abortion, and to “no-fault” divorce. Consider also that a chorus of modern-day conservative voices have often joined with leftist radicals pushing such policies in order to abruptly silence any and all retrogrades who would dare to turn back the clock and undo any of these culture-demolishing toxins.
How did a 20th century nation of Christian families come to embrace the three-headed hydra of Neronian anti-familialism—namely, contraception, pornography, and divorce? Through the normalization of ideas generated in the ivory tower, of course, where America continues to send its youth. Further, contemplate what other perversions and pernicious ideas presently exist in embryonic form within the academic incubator (i.e., LGBTQ+, critical race theory, polyamory, etc.) ready to break out and cause even more detriment and devastation to our cultural and civilizational foundations.
To make matters worse, the indoor cat academics responsible for generating these toxic ideas—like a swordless Damocles—enjoy diplomatic levels of cultural immunity from accountability, as they wield their tremendous asymmetric influence upon our culture. No one in our Christian society ever troubles to force them to render an account of the raw destructive effects of their anti-Christian theorizing. It’s bizarre.
As Thomas Sowell once noted,
[Intellectuals are] people whose end products are ideas . . . [while] the engineer is judged by the end product which is not simply ideas. If he builds a building that collapses, it doesn’t matter how brilliant his idea was, he’s ruined. Conversely, if an intellectual who is brilliant has an idea for rearranging society, and that ends in disaster, he pays no price at all.
More bizarrely still, society seems to not even notice the connection between the violent degradation of its most fundamental basic unit, the family, and the anti-family ethos and subculture now ubiquitous within the walls of America’s universities.
Summarily, it is altogether short-sighted, historically ignorant, and fundamentally self-defeating for conservatives to attempt to fight the culture war with impotent half-measures on the institutional fronts noted above while nonetheless continuing to generously feed the brain of the leftist beast which ultimately directs them. Until things drastically improve, conservatives must therefore refuse to send their money and offspring into the bowels of the woke indoctrination center known as present-day college.
If conservatives actually want to win the culture war, we must stop diagnosing our fallen republic’s ills by symptoms alone. Instead, we must address root causes. Accordingly, if the swamp of big-government-by-bread-and-circuses is to be drained successfully, and our culture and republic reclaimed, then the fetid swamp of academia must be drained first and with the greatest of urgency.
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Michael Robillard is an American philosopher, writer, Army veteran, and Roman Catholic. He has been published by the Oxford University Press, New York Times, Aeon, Fox News, and Quillette and has been featured on PBS’s “The Open Mind,” and “Tucker Carlson Today.” He is from South Shore, Massachusetts. Timothy Gordon is a Catholic philosopher, published author, and host of the “Rule for Retrogrades” podcast.
Photo “College Students” by Stanley Morales.
