LIVE NOT BY LIES

HIgher Education is Ruining Our Kids

The intellectual deconstruction of our young people by the critical theory indoctrination factories we call universities is a hot topic on virtually all indy media and better writers than I have taken it on. But personally, with not enough years left to rectify it, the biggest regret of my life is that I couldn’t pursue the kind of classics education that produced agile, confident thinkers like the late Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis, who recently also died. Both of them are products of the elite British system that at its best can claim some of the finest and most critically thinking minds of our era but even it is foundering under the weight of dimwitted woke orthodoxy. This week a trans activist Crazy Glued her hand to the floor of the Oxford Union to protest a speaker with a different point of view.

Hitchens and Amis — Best Friends

“Hitch” and Amis were both Oxford men, Hitch graduating with a 3rd-class degree in 1967 after reading Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Balliol College. He left school a socialist but constant growth based on experience and learning meant he changed positions when confronted with new information — the sign of someone who is fully alive to the world and not bogged down in a prison of ideology. Even when I thought he was wrong, supporting the Iraq War and his devout atheism being examples, I was never offended by his contrarian positions because they were authentically held and he cared not who might think him wrong.

I had the pleasure of having lunch with him in Toronto in the early 90s. The CBC flew him up to speak to the staff of The Fifth Estate about writing for television — something about which he knew next to nothing. But he was a charming rogue who treated everyone he met that day as if they were the smartest person in the room. Later over a preposterously boozy lunch — martinis, wine and cognac, people in our large group vied for his attention and it was all great fun. I was somewhat shy, which was weird for me, but I happily observed the Benediction of Hitch from the other end of the table as my colleagues courted this immensely likeable, albeit heavily “refreshed” literary star. Vanity Fair’s former editor Graydon Carter said this about a lunch with Hitchens.

If you ever had the good fortune to spend time with Christopher, as I did over long lunches and even longer dinners, you would have been an audience to one of the more spectacular minds in recent history. There was nothing Christopher hadn’t read and couldn’t recall from memory. Late into the night and well into his cups, he could recite Gussie Fink-Nottle’s prize-giving speech at Market Snodsbury Grammar School—and precisely the way P. G. Wodehouse wrote it. Like all sane people, he considered Wodehouse the greatest practitioner of the English language.

I know that I can hold my own with most educated people but I have large gaps that I would love to fill and I suspect that one day, certain positions that I hold will change with new information — likely gleaned from history.

Here is an oldie from my Hitchens collection that celebrates Orwell. It is long so bookmark this and listen to it when you can give it the time it deserves. Totally prescient.

Hitch’s ability to lampoon sacred cows like the Clintons suggests he would be appalled by the groupthink and infantile chanting that drowned out Scott Atlas recently during an address at a Florida College. I know Scott and admired his courage in the face of utter media lunacy during Covid. To see him shouted down by a bunch of indoctrinated teenagers, merely because he tried to help President Trump manage the pandemic is very disheartening.

I bet if you asked any of them what they were mad about, they couldn’t articulate a single policy — their only issue is that he had worked for a man their professors despise. This could have been a learning experience but those are no longer encouraged. Better to put your hands over your ears and and chant. Video linked here. Embeds are no longer working because Substack and Twitter are feuding, so click through.

Indoctrinated students at San Francisco State attacked swimmer Riley Gaines over her stance that natal males should be prevented from women’s competition. The video is shocking and don’t think for a minute this behaviour isn’t encouraged. In fact the school “thanked” the protestors for being “peaceful”. Views that violate hardcore trans ideology must be silenced and the perpetrators stopped at any cost.

At Stanford, where Scott is employed, emotional basket cases, also known as law students went ballistic on Judge Kyle Duncan, a guest speaker, because he had been appointed by a Conservative president. The Diversity Equity and Inclusion Dean only make things worse. The tape is galling.

The Stanford Daily put it this way:

Stanford Law School (SLS) became the target of public scrutiny after Judge Kyle Duncan’s visit to SLS on Thursday, March 9 was continuously interrupted and cut short due to the heated interactions between Duncan, the student protesters and the SLS Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Tirien Steinbach.

In a statement to the SLS community released on March 22 by SLS Dean Jenny Martinez, Martinez announced that all SLS students will take part in a mandatory half-day of training “on the topic of freedom of speech and the norms of the legal profession.” Martinez also wrote that Dean Steinbach is on leave.

There are many more examples but the one with Scott was especially troubling. The response was very much a product of propaganda and conditioning. And I’m worried about what our lives will be like when this lot takes its place in the burgeoning managerial state with its penchant for censorship and approved dogma.

I emailed Scott as soon as I saw the awful videos and he wrote right back saying it was a shame that the students hadn’t heard his final thoughts…..

We need you, your generation, to reinstate the moral backbone, the ethical compass – and the basic civility that is disappearing from America.

We cannot have a civil society if it’s filled with people, led by people, who refuse to allow discussion of views counter to their own.  We desperately need leadership that unites, not divides; leaders with a moral compass, who know right from wrong, who believe in strong family values; leaders who are not afraid to defend our precious freedoms—America’s hard-earned freedoms that uniquely provide opportunity sought by millions the world over; leaders with integrity—or this country, as an ethical society, as a virtuous society, as a free and diverse society, is in serious trouble.

Finally—we must never forget what GK Chesterton said—

“Right is right, even if nobody does it. Wrong is wrong, even if everybody is wrong about it”

Scott is still paying a price for speaking out about the lockdowns, masks and mandates and I hope he takes comfort from the words he quoted.

As for Hitchens, I suspect he’d be a C-19 heretic like most critically thinking people, including his brother Peter who was early and very vocal. In the meantime, based on the class of 2023, the rest of us are in real trouble. Homeschooling and defunding radical universities is the only option now.

Even Hitchens and Amis’ old alma mater is drinking from the poison chalice. (video link)

I’d hoped to do a summer course at Oxford — to soak up the high-minded Britishness of it but given its near-total surrender to the church of censorious ideology — I think I’ll pass. If there is any justice, Hitchens and Amis will be there though, malevolent spirits ever haunting Oxford’s tarnished halls.

Later today, a premium episode with Chadwick Moore, who has written a biography of Tucker Carlson and has some hot tea to spill on why he was fired. It’s a hell of a story.

Also — for your reading pleasure The Press Versus The President by Jeff Gerth, last week’s guest and worth a read. This is the ultimate forensic takedown of the media’s reporting on Russiagate — the story that never was. How the hell did the New York Times receive a Pulitzer?

See you later here for a premium episode and Friday night on the pod.

Stay Critical…..