The Beast

College presidents' skewered testimony raises question: What do they do?
L-R) Harvard President Claudine Gay, former University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill, American University professor Pamela Nadell and MIT President Sally Kornbluth testify before the House Education and Workforce Committee on Dec 5. (Photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

* “The Beast” is taken from Naomi Wolf’s latest book “Facing the Beast”.

Dr. Naomi Wolf Announces NEW BOOK "Facing the Beast: Courage, Faith and Resistance in a New Dark ...

You’ve all seen it or at least heard of it: the congressional testimony of the presidents of Harvard, UPenn, and MIT, particularly under the questioning of Elise Stefanik (R-NY).  In monotone answers, as if coached by lawyers or PR experts, these people refused to declare that antisemitic speech calling for genocide of Jews by staff and students violates their schools’ official code of conduct (see video below).  Their cagey responses say much about them and more so about the educational rot on their campuses and in their heads.  It’s as if a malign beast has descended upon these places.  Parents, beware.

What “beast”?  The thing is more than a personification of evil.  It’s the influence of ideas that can inspire people to do evil things.  Some ideas are inherently evil.  Some ideas are “beasts”, mostly because they contradict our nature.  They bring out the worst in us and cause our demise.  How do we know them?  A biblical warning: “Ye shall know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:16).

Today’s “beast” is the Marxist oppressor/oppressed claptrap.  It’s everywhere in the quasi-mystical jargon in DEI, ESG, CRT, the politics of identity, etc., and throughout K to grad school.  There aren’t many institutions not infected by it.  Your kids are getting a steady dose of it whenever they step into a classroom, watch TV, go to a movie, and cruise the internet on their cellphone.

The “beast” has a family tree.  The 60’s counterculture was a hip version of an older belief system, the same one that is now bombarding your kids from age 5 to 26.  German Marxist agitator Rudi Dutschke in 1967 preached a “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” strategy, the so-called Long March through the institutions.  In other words, he proposed that the zealots conquer the system from within rather than tear it down – co-opt it through infiltration.  He rejiggered one of his Marxist inspirations’ (Antonio Gramsci) revolutionary “war of position” language from a few decades before.  And, boy, did he and they succeed as evidenced by the prevarications on display in last week’s congressional testimony.  The college presidents can’t bring themselves to condemn the now common Dutschke/Gramsci/Marcuse grotesqueries replete in their lecture halls and on their grounds.

Parents, are you sure that you are not bankrolling the ruination of your child’s mind in a leftist finishing school?  And all this so your kids can have the prestige in possessing something that is quickly losing its prestige?  How does that compute?

The degree and campus experience are rapidly losing their value.  The indoctrination and subsequent lack of rigor cannot be hidden for long.  Dunces and extremists with degrees cannot interminably escape the withering eye of reality.  Every employer will come to realize the truth in “Ye shall know them by their fruits”.  Statue-topplers aren’t likely to keep the sewer system in operation.

Send your kids and money elsewhere.  Please watch the short clip.

RogerG

Avarice, Deceit, and Cruelty: “The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West” by Peter Cozzens

The book is a corrective for anyone wanting to go beyond politically correct fairy tales and the myths of manifest destiny. Naiveté is rampant alongside cruelty and bigotry.

Interesting to me is the now-familiar use of the momentary state of science to draw grand conclusions about people, such as the Native Americans (or American Indians, if you will). Couple that with “progressive” reformist zeal and disaster awaits.

Nathan C. Meeker

No better example can be found than the brief career of rookie Indian agent Nathan C. Meeker (above). A utopian down to his bones, it took him only a year to rile up the Utes as he impetuously and zealously embarked on the all-too-familiar crusade of socially engineering the Utes of Colorado in 1878-9 (pictured belwo). It would end in death all around, including Meeker’s own, the rape of his wife and daughter, and the near destruction of the Utes (illustrated below).

Utes in 1870s photo.
Meeker’s destroyed agency in 1879.

Is there a lesson for us in this whole sordid affair?

RogerG

Bibliography and sources:

  1. The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West, Peter Cozzens, read pp 341-357.

Ideas are Important in a Biography on Martin Luther

Book recommendation: “Luther: Man between God and the Devil” by Heiko A. Oberman. The book may be out of print but used copies are available.

It is unique among contemporary biographies. Modern biographies emphasize external and objectified circumstances to define their subject. Personal background, psychology, social, and economic factors are treated as all-determinative. The ideas of the person get lost in the shuffle. Yet, the ideas are the catalyst for shattering the preeminence of the Catholic Church in Western Europe, and in much of Christendom.

By objectifying a person with an over-emphasis on such attributes, we get to avoid the difficult task of grappling with their ideas. Run-of-the-mill biographies cheapen the subjects by stripping away that which made them famous – their ideas.

Oberman’s treatment is refreshing, as opposed to the more common loose speculation peddled to Oprah’s clientele.

RogerG