We should be proud of destroying academia as it is currently constituted. This is one of the greatest achievements of the Trump revolution, perhaps the most important over the long-term, something so critical that it’s taking an inordinate amount of effort from the administration. It’s worth every bit of it. Academia is a poisonous redoubt where people who hate us are pampered and paid for by the tax money of decent Americans. Its purpose is to facilitate ruling class replication and spread its slimy tentacles into every part of our government, culture, and institutions. For too long, academia has succeeded in its Marxist mission. But we’re turning that around.
It’s been remarkably easy. Here’s something that academia doesn’t want you to know. The people involved with it are mostly unbelievably unaccomplished. Sure, there are some brilliant scientists here and there, but they’re not really academics. They’re doing stuff. When we talk about academia, we’re talking about the administrators, the DEI poohbahs, and the humanities faculty that doesn’t produce anything except books full of pinko nonsense. These are distinctly unimpressive people. They’re not geniuses. They’re certainly not plotting in a volcano lair. Academia got power not because of its efforts but because of other social pathologies. Because we got rid of IQ testing and because our high schools went to crap, a college credential became – for a long time – the only way for employers to ensure that an applicant could probably read, that he was not a drooling weirdo, and that he would show up on time wearing clothes.
Basically, a college diploma now does what a high school diploma should do, except unionized high school teachers are so grossly incompetent that you can’t rely on a kid coming out of high school being able to count past 21 with his pants on. And, of course, once credentials become currency, there was arbitrage – strivers seek the better credential and game the system to do it. That’s why the Ivy Leagues are so popular. It’s not that they’re great schools. I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing Ivy League graduates as a lawyer and am distinctly unimpressed. It’s that they have a brand value disconnected from their objective value, and it’s the brand value that they’re selling.
But here’s the other thing – like every other institution, the colleges have decided to become political actors and not pursue their proper objective of producing educated citizens ready to take on important jobs in society. They want to turn out little activists. But they never counted on the fact that we would notice this; they assumed brand value would trump objective value, and for a while they were right. But not anymore.
They became convinced of their own superiority because they had invaded the institution and were pretending that the institution was what the institution had been when it earned its reputation. They got high on their own supply. But the rest of us were also sampling their supply, and we were getting repelled by what we were getting. They were providing us with exactly what they wanted to give us, which is a bunch of activists. But activists are only good at things like wrecking society. They’re good at pursuing a Marxist agenda. They are not good at doing actual work. You let a few of them into your company and pretty soon you’re having Maoist struggle sessions about the tyranny of the phallic patriarchy and everybody has pronouns in their email signature blocks. But you won’t have smart people who do a good job.
Bud Light is an example. They went out and got some chick with shiny creds to handle marketing, and she destroyed the brand. She insulted Bud Light drinkers as penis-wielding morons and then decided that what the brand needed was to identify with a perverted male freak who pretended to be a woman. If you’ve met beer drinkers you will see the problem with this strategy. But, of course, she hadn’t. She was of an entirely different class, one that looked down their rhinoplasty-sculpted noses at the hops-loving proles. Want to guess where she went to school? You know the answer. It’s almost too good to be true, but it is true. Yep, she’s a Harvard grad and also went to Wharton.
People in the real world have noticed that the alleged cream of the crop is really the cream of the crap. They’re just not very good at stuff. Some of them are very smart, but they were very smart before they ever got to college. They were smart enough to game the system to get through the admissions process. That is the thing about Harvard. It’s not going to Harvard that matters. It’s getting into Harvard. Once you get into Harvard, you’re done. It’s finished. No one fails. Everybody gets straight A’s. You’re going to walk out with that Harvard diploma, and you’ll be able to impress a declining number of stupid people who are still impressed by diplomas that say “Harvard.” Then you will spend your life dropping your Harvard affiliation thirty seconds into every single conversation you have for the rest of your life. It’s like being a Navy SEAL, except you’re from Cambridge and can’t do a push-up.
These subpar products of academia completely infiltrated our government, corporations, and cultural institutions. The leftists love academia because, through it, the left can self-select our elite. But our elite is not elite. Academia masquerades as an educational enterprise. In reality, colleges are just a collection of forward operating bases in the culture war. And we’re tired of it. We’re tired of subsidizing them to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, especially when a third of their students are anti-American foreigners who come here to figuratively defecate on our country while taking full advantage of its largesse.
In a parallel development, tech is disrupting academia’s cushy scam. It’s not just that students can AI their assignments. It’s that AI makes universities redundant. The idea of hundreds of people sitting in a large auditorium, listening to some professor drone on and on, is a 20th-century notion. It’s now the 21st century. Online learning doesn’t have the intimacy of sharing a giant lecture hall with 500 of your closest friends while you flick through your phone as the non-binary weirdo at the front of the hall up-talks on and on about indigenous trans decolonialization. But, for someone who wants to learn, it can teach cheap and fast.
That’s another thing. Academia has priced itself out of existence. You can easily spend $100,000 a year at one of these Ivy League schools. A lot of that is subsidized by taxpayers, but not for long. Normal Americans are now aware that normal Americans can’t get in, and that colleges are actively anti-white, anti-Asian, and anti-Jewish. You can get in only if you have some special something that ignites a tingle up the leg of the admissions officer – and every admissions officer is a Democrat woman on SSRIs. Maybe you don’t know what gender you are. Maybe your great-great-great-great-grandfather came from Uganda. Perhaps you’re some sort of communist punk. The regular Americans understand that this gateway to success (allegedly) is closed to them. And they’re tired of paying for it.
Academia is all out of friends on the right. There was a time when a Republican could stand up for colleges and not be crushed by the movement, but that time is long gone. It’s our enemy. We should make an example of it. And as we do that, there’s an immeasurable benefit to be had. We’ll get the left out of the business of choosing America’s elite.
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