BlueRidgeForum

UPDATE SEPTEMBER 2 — “For dedicated campus conservatives and libertarians everywhere.” Morton Blackwell of the widely respected Leadership Institute draws our attention to their new Campus Reform blog here and provides basic facts about Campus Reform here.

Losing the Culture Struggle Means Losing Our Freedom

How Did We Start to Lose Our Culture? By way of an answer, we can view the National Association of Scholars posting of a “Pajamas Media TV, a 13-minute video in which Bill Whittle chronicles the rise of political correctness since the Frankfurt School and the rise of ‘critical theory.’”

Conservatives and the center-right generally are doing their utmost these days to treat the simultaneous afflictions of Obamacare, Cap-and-Tax, a shaky national-security posture, and the shameless advancing of statism.

But their treatment may only amount to band-aids if they cannot somehow bring enough of alienated older, and emerging younger generations into a culture necessary for a constitutional republic to flourish.

The only harder job than doing that, moreover, is to convince Republican politicians that this is as important a focus for us all as their latest poll or campaign mantra. And many party apparatchiks are salivating over possible Republican gains this year and in 2010 from president Obama’s overreaching. They fantasize that all will come back to “normal” - - instead of realizing that any gains may be the Party’s last chance of regaining broad public confidence — through better ways of thinking and governing.

Perhaps the Tea Parties and Recess Rallies, which often criticize GOP big-government habits  as well as the Democrats, can shake the Republican Establishment hard enough to re-tune their antennae — more toward the many concerned constituents, who have found their voices at these gatherings, and less toward the Washington, D. C., Annapolis, or Richmond Establishment which too often circumscribes their daily frame of reference.

Is President Obama Filling a Great Void of the Spirit?

Robin, “a recovering liberal and a psychotherapist in Berkeley,” wrote last Thursday in the American Thinker about what we are up against in her post “In Obama We Trust?” 

Robin declares - -

“I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the factors in my life that lured me far Left for so long; what captivated me and held me there even with mounting evidence that the ideology was bankrupt. And why are millions still following the Pied Piper of Chicago, even though he’s looking increasingly more corrupt and vacuous?

And I’ve come to this: the Left is filled to the brim with people like me, who grew up in homes with God in permanent exile and various adults floating in and out in hot pursuit of self fulfillment. With no way to understand life, this realm starts looking like an unmanageable House of Horrors. The result: people turn to someone like Obama to engineer a whole new world. 

So we have a situation today with the Left in charge,preaching their religion which is anti-religion.”

. . . . .  

“I saw a blog where a young person posts, ‘I have pictures of Obama on my wall. He gives me a reason to get out of bed in the morning.’ There are no rational arguments about bailouts and taxes that will counteract this desperation for purpose.”

           . . . . .

“And it’s not just the young.  Baby boomers are being dragged kicking and screaming into old age, without any spiritual guideposts and within a culture that fears and despises anything old. In ancient times, elders were revered as the cultural wellspring of wisdom and tradition.   

But in most of the First World, older people are as disposable as yesterday’s trash.   How unacceptable to grow old in a culture that finds no grace, only disgrace, in wrinkles, and wants to hustle you out the door as soon as possible.

Baby boomers are also dancing to Obama’s beat, enveloped in feelings of hope and change, holding on for dear life to their long lost youth. But it’s not the real 60’s with its hard drugs, violence, and exploitation of women, but a fantasy, frozen in time, of peace and flower power.”

. . . . .

“If we as a culture don’t find our way back to those young and old who are lost in space, adrift and unanchored, they will embrace false idols.  For as long as Obama is the only game in town, the only way people can feel alive and hopeful,they’ll ignore every red flag and defend Obama until their last dying breath. They must believe in him. The alternative is just too unbearable.” (Underscoring Forum’s throughout.)

Readers may want to revisit our post here from a year ago last July where we warned about “Ignoring Obama’s Appeal as ‘Regenerative Healer.’”

Our Students:  Divested of their history, literacy, and ability to reason.

“While the economy tanks, the government job sector is growing. Young people are encouraged to educate themselves for jobs in nonprofits and government agencies. They build up their academic resumes with ‘community service’ that does nothing for their intellectual growth.” — Mary Grabar

Thursday George Leef writing in National Review on Line that “Educational Dumbing Down Greases the Rails for Statism” alerted us to Mary Grabar’s essay here .

Teacher and writer Grabar believes “Obama’s Civilian Troops Were Trained by Ayers: Obama’s election and the health care reform push would have been impossible without the dumbing down of academia.”

She explains  - -

“But were it not for the “Destructive Generation ” instantiating themselves in our schools, the election of Barack Obama would not have been possible. Had we had a generation who understood history, we would have had voters who understood the vacuity of his rhetoric and the implications of ’spreading the wealth.’ They would have understood how his writings on Saul Alinsky displayed his propensity for stirring up racial animus, demonizing the opposition, and threatening executives with ‘pitchfork’ mobs (that he would rouse up). We would have seen how his teaching a course on ‘critical race theory ‘ would naturally lead to a nomination of a Supreme Court justice who sees herself as a ‘wise Latina woman’ who can ‘empathize.’

They would have seen that Obama’s alliance with Bill Ayers, who has been working on behalf of ‘education’ in Venezuela, would lead to a cozy meeting with Hugo Chavez. While Venezuelans protest against a government takeover of the schools, we allow Bill Ayers to spread his poison to future teachers while paying him an annual salary of $126,000.

Like South American dictators who promise peasants a few hectares through redistribution, Obama promises such things as ‘free’ medical care, education, and new cars to his followers. Like Chavez, he appeals to the peasants — literally the illegal ones streaming into the country, promising rights of citizenship.

The historian Richard Pipes notes that the Russian revolution succeeded in large part because of the uneducated peasants. And in this country, the early communists targeted immigrants who spoke no English and were unacquainted with American values.

Today’s communists, like Bill Ayers, work in our schools aiming to keep American students in the same level of ignorance and tribalism as the peasants of Russia and South America.

They began their nefarious deeds in the 1960s. With help from the Soviet Union, they fomented hatred of the United States and then successfully groomed a generation to colonize the schools. The SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), of which Ayers was a member, spelled out their strategies in their position paper, the Port Huron Statement Employing the old Soviet strategy of ‘boring from within,’ they focused on ‘an overlooked seat of influence’: the university.” (Underscoring Forum’s.)

Read Grabar’s entire piece (with footnotes) here.  She cautions - -

“Conservatives who have seen through these techniques but simply dismiss these kooky professors do so at their peril. They may be protecting their own children through homeschooling and private education, but they are reaping the products in the voting mobs that elected Barack Obama.”(Underscoring Forum’s.)

And that, of course, is the problem:  “simply dismissing these kooky professors.”

We wrote in our “Radical University Empires vs. Clueless State Lawmakers” here last May about - -

“what is happening to colleges and universities in the United States and about the incapacity of Republican state legislators in Maryland and,apparently,also Virginia,to cope with the dangerous direction our own taxpayer-supported universities have taken.” (Underscoring Forum’s.)

We had earlier revealed that in 2008 the Maryland General Assembly (with some Republican help) approved so-called cultural-diversity legislation for “institutions of higher education.” On the other side of the Potomac, we have seen the “diversity” plague in Virginia Tech‘s hiring schemes.

As one analyst wrote –

“it is surely time to initiate a public campaign of watchdog legislation and purse-string vigilance to address the monumental aberration embodied in the modern academy.” 

Readers can see a current ad from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE)  here.  The ad shows - -

“. . . the colleges and universities that have earned FIRE’s Red Alert distinction for being the ‘worst of the worst’ when it comes to liberty on campus. Brandeis University, Colorado College, Johns Hopkins University, Michigan State University, and Tufts University are listed in the print ad, while Bucknell University, a late addition to the list, will be prominently featured in Facebook ads and in the school’s own newspaper.” (Underscoring Forum’s.)

And we continue to fear that  - -

“[W]e simply cannot depend on the Republican Establishments of Maryland and Virginia to deal with serious threats like the transformation of our taxpayer-supported universities into mechanisms for the dissolution of our way of life.”

Minding the Campus here and the National Association of Scholars here are two of several useful web sources for Maryland and Virginia conservatives to track campus developments.

The conservative base in Maryland and Virginia needs to contrive their own ways to restore the culture in their taxpayer-supported schools. Likely the base will have to do the heavy lifting.