Other People’s Money Part 2
By Patrick Hall
Over time, I came to a hard but undeniable truth: Socialism and the Progressive Democratic welfare state did nothing to help people, and it ruined our greatest cities.
In the late 1960 and early 70s, during my pseudo-Socialist-Black-Militant phase, I spent much of my early college years traveling to places like Hamilton, London, and Toronto, Ontario, in support of my draft-dodging friends. Self-righteous quislings like myself were protected from the military draft by our student deferments. We all held very anti-capitalist, anti-American, and pro-socialist/Communist sympathies, whether we knew it or not. To many of us, America and our Republic were bad or lacking. We wondered when Americans would understand the endemic corruption of oppressive, free-market capitalist forms of governance and begin to adopt the “good parts” of the system known as Socialism. So, my first spouse (a sanctimonious pseudo-hippie) and I always seem to gravitate toward Socialism while we also donned our STOP-AT -TWO Paul Ehrlich tee shirts. We arrogantly and with great obtuseness bemoan the fact that more Americans weren’t as enlightened. My God, we were such insufferable assholes back then. Pardon my French!
But it was the Universities and colleges that fostered and preached the benefits of Socialism. It would only get worse in the following decades with the ascendancy of what I called “The Studies” at our institutions of higher learning. They would act as a cultural, political, and economic Trojan horse. It was a pedagogic philosophy or secular catechism that skillfully and with stealth began to undermine and miseducate an entire population of Americans about capitalism, free markets, and our Republic. At the same time, it constructed its current imprimatur for Socialism and other forms of Communist Lite political schemes. Remember! Socialism and/or Communist Lite are a ruse, gimmick, a sleight of hand to relieve the tax-paying populace of their money or wealth.
The Reparation for slavery movement or stratagem is such a scam. It is a Joe the Plumber – “Obama share the wealth, Socialist nonsense” on steroids. It basically wants people who have never owned slaves to pay money to people who never were slaves. Reparation was the ultimate public policy doppelganger. It attempted to pass legislation that made it possible to bring a lawsuit based on what “one group of dead people did to another group of dead people”. Democratic politicians like Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), Maxine Waters (D-CA), Kweisi Mfume (D-MD), Jasmine Crockett (D-TX), as well as most of the Congressional Black Caucus, displayed a disgusting amount of chutzpah when it came to the reparations money grab.
By the way, just as I would find a white congressional caucus, or any other group, to be racist. Am I the only one who finds the Congressional Black Caucus to be a racist organization? I know black people can’t be racists, blah, blah, blah! That, according to many “really smart/deep thinking” Black/African American Studies Professors over the decades. The divisive thinking underpinning the “Blacks can’t be racist defection” is that blacks lack the power. This is hyperbolic sectarianism! The diatribe concerning “power” was directly lifted from Marxist, Leninist, Socialist, and Communist socio-economic and political thought. It was given new life decades ago by the secular catechumenates of the Black Power Movement. Later, neo-segregationists under the banner of Critical Race Theory (CRT) continue this fallacy.
The Studies included, but were not limited to, new programs and majors coming under the academic nomenclature of African American or Black Studies, Women's and Feminist Studies, Multicultural Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies, or the broader LGBTQ+ literature, as well as Africana Studies, to name a few. By the way, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani's so-called college major was the post-colonial bashing of Western culture that was or “is” Africana Studies.
All of these new academic disciplines or advocacy scholarship could easily have been incorporated into more traditional, established disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, Western History, and economics. However, advocacy and/or naked promulgation, a systemic hate or, at best, dismissiveness for Western society, became its lifeblood. The Studies generally devolved into the pessimistic, if not contravening, narrative of blaming everything on Western culture, the United States, and White people (in particular, white men). To reiterate, we did not watch what was being taught or propagandized at colleges and universities.
It was the late conservative author and architect of the modern conservative movement, William F. Buckley, Jr, in his seminal work God and Man at Yale, who first sounded the alarm about the socio-political and economic effects of Socialism within university culture. In God and Man at Yale, Buckley exposed that many colleges and universities were (or have become) hotbeds of atheism, socialism, communism, and other collectivist authoritarian dogma.
Buckley and others also feared that the anti-American/anti-Republic as well as pro-Socialist catechetics being sown in colleges and universities was making its way into the nation's high schools and K-8 education via propagandists who come through the nation's Teacher Education Programs. It was the late Marxist scholar, journalist, and politician, Antonia Gramsci, who viewed the education system as “the popular venue” for spreading the Marxist and Socialist perspectives.
It all seemed rather benign at the time. Much of the Studies started as legitimate, if not naïve, attempts at cultural-historical remediation and inclusion. What it turned into was race-ethnic-gender consensual hallucination. It was leftist, countercultural activism at its finest. This type of pedantic activism on the part of the university-faculty-class was nothing new. As mentioned earlier, college faculty and administrators (or the hippies that never left) had been actively trying to shape the learning environment or ethos for decades. It was especially apparent in the early 1990s with the effort to add writers of color, left-of-center, if not outright Progressive Liberal Socialist women and men, to the list of so-called “dead white males” that dominated reading lists. This was the “Canon Wars.” At its heart, the Canon Wars were not only about inclusion but also led to the outright exclusion, ignoring, and censoring of some of the best minds and literature in Western history and culture. The emerging cultural left on college campuses often tries to keep speakers, mostly Conservative and/or Republicans, from speaking. The Hoover Institute recently released a list of Progressive/Liberal speaker invites vs. Conservative speaker invites, showing an 84.7% advantage for Progressive/left-of-center/Socialist speakers. College faculty and administrators often play a significant role in determining who does or does not get to present on college campuses.
Of course, nothing is surprising about this Progressive/left-of-center, often Socialist bias. Anyone could go to most college campuses and randomly choose the first 100 faculty and administrators they see: 90% would be Democratic, Progressive, Leftist, Communist, or Socialist-leaning. Of course, you might find individuals who see themselves as politically and culturally “Moderate.” But that is often a ruse. Moderates will often take the intellectual high ground, saying that they often look at, say, a politician and meticulously review his or her writings and speeches. After much thinking and deliberation, they will then vote for a Hillary Clinton, Gavin Newsom, Barack Obama, or a loopy Jasmine Crocker (D-TX) or AOC. They will then give a nod to “I-hope-our-military-and-Donald-Trump-fail-in-Iran” Democrats like Cory Booker (D-NJ) or Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). For many Moderates, it's all a “look-how-open-minded-and-discerning-I-am” game.
The Change
It was neither a Road to Damascus nor a Lutheran “here I stand, I can do no other” movement. Before the 1960s, college faculty and administrators were pretty much middle-of-the-road in terms of their cultural-political viewpoints. As the late Charles Krauthammer and current Rasmussen polling observed, colleges dating back to the mid-twentieth century generally leaned to the left or voted Democratic, but not by a very lopsided margin, as it evolved over the last 50-60 years.
As a sidebar, even though I was attending college over fifty years ago, one did not know the political leaning of one's professor or teacher. It would have been considered “bad form” on the part of the professorate back then. Of course, the big state universities and later prestigious colleges like Duke, Yale, and Harvard began their migration to the cultural-political left or sympathies for collectivist or socialist philosophies.
It was when the Greatest Generation professors began to retire in the 1990s and the Baby Boom generation began their gradual takeover that the education system began its “hard-political-left” turn. Once more, the Greatest Generation professors and teachers were predominantly white men who had fought in World War II. They then got a boost after their service in higher education institutions. This wave of World War II constituencies or scholars included many conservatives and Republicans.
The Baby-Boomer academics of my generation, in contrast, were actually more diverse by race, gender, or sexual orientation, but less diverse in their politics or “THINKING.” With some nuances, this cohort's socio-political-historical discernment generally ran from “left, more left, to most left.” Former President Barack Obama was the result, and a political disciple of this educational mindset. He was the first “semi-open” Socialist United States President. As a sidebar, Woodrow Wilson was perhaps the first.1
Many Baby-Boomer academics, as well as Barack Obama and others, were strongly influenced by the great tsunami of social protest in the 1960s, much of which was authored and funded by Communist and/or Socialist regimes such as the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China. Once more, many of them flooded into academia and became dominant in the social sciences and humanities. Even the sciences were partly affected, most notably by the hoaxers who pushed global warming and then global cooling. They later settled on the “Heads I win, and Tails I win” doublespeak of
Climate Change. As alluded to earlier, climate change advocates only seem to attack and accuse Western cultures and the United States of “destroying Mother Earth.” It was all about money in the Socialist-Communist bank, and many people in America and the EU fell for the scam. To paraphrase the Conservative columnist George Will, climate change and environmentalism were often a thinly veiled form of Socialism.2
_______________
1. See., Andrew Napolitano -- Theodore and Woodrow: How two American Presidents destroyed Constitutional Freedom.
2. See., Steve Milloy – Green Hell.
Over time, I came to a hard but undeniable truth: Socialism and the Progressive Democratic welfare state did nothing to help people, and it ruined our greatest cities.
In the late 1960 and early 70s, during my pseudo-Socialist-Black-Militant phase, I spent much of my early college years traveling to places like Hamilton, London, and Toronto, Ontario, in support of my draft-dodging friends. Self-righteous quislings like myself were protected from the military draft by our student deferments. We all held very anti-capitalist, anti-American, and pro-socialist/Communist sympathies, whether we knew it or not. To many of us, America and our Republic were bad or lacking. We wondered when Americans would understand the endemic corruption of oppressive, free-market capitalist forms of governance and begin to adopt the “good parts” of the system known as Socialism. So, my first spouse (a sanctimonious pseudo-hippie) and I always seem to gravitate toward Socialism while we also donned our STOP-AT -TWO Paul Ehrlich tee shirts. We arrogantly and with great obtuseness bemoan the fact that more Americans weren’t as enlightened. My God, we were such insufferable assholes back then. Pardon my French!
But it was the Universities and colleges that fostered and preached the benefits of Socialism. It would only get worse in the following decades with the ascendancy of what I called “The Studies” at our institutions of higher learning. They would act as a cultural, political, and economic Trojan horse. It was a pedagogic philosophy or secular catechism that skillfully and with stealth began to undermine and miseducate an entire population of Americans about capitalism, free markets, and our Republic. At the same time, it constructed its current imprimatur for Socialism and other forms of Communist Lite political schemes. Remember! Socialism and/or Communist Lite are a ruse, gimmick, a sleight of hand to relieve the tax-paying populace of their money or wealth.
The Reparation for slavery movement or stratagem is such a scam. It is a Joe the Plumber – “Obama share the wealth, Socialist nonsense” on steroids. It basically wants people who have never owned slaves to pay money to people who never were slaves. Reparation was the ultimate public policy doppelganger. It attempted to pass legislation that made it possible to bring a lawsuit based on what “one group of dead people did to another group of dead people”. Democratic politicians like Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), Maxine Waters (D-CA), Kweisi Mfume (D-MD), Jasmine Crockett (D-TX), as well as most of the Congressional Black Caucus, displayed a disgusting amount of chutzpah when it came to the reparations money grab.
By the way, just as I would find a white congressional caucus, or any other group, to be racist. Am I the only one who finds the Congressional Black Caucus to be a racist organization? I know black people can’t be racists, blah, blah, blah! That, according to many “really smart/deep thinking” Black/African American Studies Professors over the decades. The divisive thinking underpinning the “Blacks can’t be racist defection” is that blacks lack the power. This is hyperbolic sectarianism! The diatribe concerning “power” was directly lifted from Marxist, Leninist, Socialist, and Communist socio-economic and political thought. It was given new life decades ago by the secular catechumenates of the Black Power Movement. Later, neo-segregationists under the banner of Critical Race Theory (CRT) continue this fallacy.
The Studies included, but were not limited to, new programs and majors coming under the academic nomenclature of African American or Black Studies, Women's and Feminist Studies, Multicultural Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies, or the broader LGBTQ+ literature, as well as Africana Studies, to name a few. By the way, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani's so-called college major was the post-colonial bashing of Western culture that was or “is” Africana Studies.
All of these new academic disciplines or advocacy scholarship could easily have been incorporated into more traditional, established disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, Western History, and economics. However, advocacy and/or naked promulgation, a systemic hate or, at best, dismissiveness for Western society, became its lifeblood. The Studies generally devolved into the pessimistic, if not contravening, narrative of blaming everything on Western culture, the United States, and White people (in particular, white men). To reiterate, we did not watch what was being taught or propagandized at colleges and universities.
It was the late conservative author and architect of the modern conservative movement, William F. Buckley, Jr, in his seminal work God and Man at Yale, who first sounded the alarm about the socio-political and economic effects of Socialism within university culture. In God and Man at Yale, Buckley exposed that many colleges and universities were (or have become) hotbeds of atheism, socialism, communism, and other collectivist authoritarian dogma.
Buckley and others also feared that the anti-American/anti-Republic as well as pro-Socialist catechetics being sown in colleges and universities was making its way into the nation's high schools and K-8 education via propagandists who come through the nation's Teacher Education Programs. It was the late Marxist scholar, journalist, and politician, Antonia Gramsci, who viewed the education system as “the popular venue” for spreading the Marxist and Socialist perspectives.
It all seemed rather benign at the time. Much of the Studies started as legitimate, if not naïve, attempts at cultural-historical remediation and inclusion. What it turned into was race-ethnic-gender consensual hallucination. It was leftist, countercultural activism at its finest. This type of pedantic activism on the part of the university-faculty-class was nothing new. As mentioned earlier, college faculty and administrators (or the hippies that never left) had been actively trying to shape the learning environment or ethos for decades. It was especially apparent in the early 1990s with the effort to add writers of color, left-of-center, if not outright Progressive Liberal Socialist women and men, to the list of so-called “dead white males” that dominated reading lists. This was the “Canon Wars.” At its heart, the Canon Wars were not only about inclusion but also led to the outright exclusion, ignoring, and censoring of some of the best minds and literature in Western history and culture. The emerging cultural left on college campuses often tries to keep speakers, mostly Conservative and/or Republicans, from speaking. The Hoover Institute recently released a list of Progressive/Liberal speaker invites vs. Conservative speaker invites, showing an 84.7% advantage for Progressive/left-of-center/Socialist speakers. College faculty and administrators often play a significant role in determining who does or does not get to present on college campuses.
Of course, nothing is surprising about this Progressive/left-of-center, often Socialist bias. Anyone could go to most college campuses and randomly choose the first 100 faculty and administrators they see: 90% would be Democratic, Progressive, Leftist, Communist, or Socialist-leaning. Of course, you might find individuals who see themselves as politically and culturally “Moderate.” But that is often a ruse. Moderates will often take the intellectual high ground, saying that they often look at, say, a politician and meticulously review his or her writings and speeches. After much thinking and deliberation, they will then vote for a Hillary Clinton, Gavin Newsom, Barack Obama, or a loopy Jasmine Crocker (D-TX) or AOC. They will then give a nod to “I-hope-our-military-and-Donald-Trump-fail-in-Iran” Democrats like Cory Booker (D-NJ) or Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). For many Moderates, it's all a “look-how-open-minded-and-discerning-I-am” game.
The Change
It was neither a Road to Damascus nor a Lutheran “here I stand, I can do no other” movement. Before the 1960s, college faculty and administrators were pretty much middle-of-the-road in terms of their cultural-political viewpoints. As the late Charles Krauthammer and current Rasmussen polling observed, colleges dating back to the mid-twentieth century generally leaned to the left or voted Democratic, but not by a very lopsided margin, as it evolved over the last 50-60 years.
As a sidebar, even though I was attending college over fifty years ago, one did not know the political leaning of one's professor or teacher. It would have been considered “bad form” on the part of the professorate back then. Of course, the big state universities and later prestigious colleges like Duke, Yale, and Harvard began their migration to the cultural-political left or sympathies for collectivist or socialist philosophies.
It was when the Greatest Generation professors began to retire in the 1990s and the Baby Boom generation began their gradual takeover that the education system began its “hard-political-left” turn. Once more, the Greatest Generation professors and teachers were predominantly white men who had fought in World War II. They then got a boost after their service in higher education institutions. This wave of World War II constituencies or scholars included many conservatives and Republicans.
The Baby-Boomer academics of my generation, in contrast, were actually more diverse by race, gender, or sexual orientation, but less diverse in their politics or “THINKING.” With some nuances, this cohort's socio-political-historical discernment generally ran from “left, more left, to most left.” Former President Barack Obama was the result, and a political disciple of this educational mindset. He was the first “semi-open” Socialist United States President. As a sidebar, Woodrow Wilson was perhaps the first.1
Many Baby-Boomer academics, as well as Barack Obama and others, were strongly influenced by the great tsunami of social protest in the 1960s, much of which was authored and funded by Communist and/or Socialist regimes such as the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China. Once more, many of them flooded into academia and became dominant in the social sciences and humanities. Even the sciences were partly affected, most notably by the hoaxers who pushed global warming and then global cooling. They later settled on the “Heads I win, and Tails I win” doublespeak of
Climate Change. As alluded to earlier, climate change advocates only seem to attack and accuse Western cultures and the United States of “destroying Mother Earth.” It was all about money in the Socialist-Communist bank, and many people in America and the EU fell for the scam. To paraphrase the Conservative columnist George Will, climate change and environmentalism were often a thinly veiled form of Socialism.2
_______________
1. See., Andrew Napolitano -- Theodore and Woodrow: How two American Presidents destroyed Constitutional Freedom.
2. See., Steve Milloy – Green Hell.
Patrick Hall is a retired University Library Director. He graduated from Canisius College and the University of Washington, where he earned Masters Degrees in Religious Studies Education, Urban Anthropology, and Library and Information Science. Mr. Hall has also completed additional coursework at the University of Buffalo, Seattle University, and St. John Fishers College of Rochester, New York. He has been published in several national publications such as Commonweal, America, Conservative Review, Headway, National Catholic Reporter, Freedom's Journal Magazine, and American Libraries. He has published in peer-reviewed publications, the Journal of Academic Librarianship, and the Internet Reference Services Quarterly. From 1997 until his retirement in January 2014, he served on the Advisory Board of Urban Library Journal, a CUNY Publication.
Posted in Opinion
Posted in Patrick Hall, Karl Marx, Cultural Marxism, #socialism, Communism, LGBTQ, Universities, Colleges, reparations, racism, Congressional Black Caucus, critical race theory, Liberal progressives, Conservatives, Hillary Clinton, , Gavin Newsom, Barack Obama, #freedomsjournalmagazine, Freedoms Journal Institute
Posted in Patrick Hall, Karl Marx, Cultural Marxism, #socialism, Communism, LGBTQ, Universities, Colleges, reparations, racism, Congressional Black Caucus, critical race theory, Liberal progressives, Conservatives, Hillary Clinton, , Gavin Newsom, Barack Obama, #freedomsjournalmagazine, Freedoms Journal Institute
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