If you’re wondering where your liberty has gone and why it left, here are a few reasons, and if you want to know where liberty still lives, there are only a few places left.
So you tried to raise your kids in the sanest, safest ways. You probably fretted about the quality of their kindergarten and elementary schools. You may even have relocated so they’d get the best introduction to serious learning in middle school. You lost your mind more than once during their high school years of experimentation and crazy stuff, then took them across the countryside looking for the perfect college experience that wouldn’t break the bank—or would. You knew, of course, most college campuses were anything-goes zones, and your imagination ran wild with the free-thinking excesses that could snare your child.
Little did you know there’s no free-thinking on campuses these days. In fact, the child you so carefully prepped for adulthood will be required to be a politically correct zombie scared to commit a microaggression, or worse, the sweet, loving person you raised will become today’s uber-bully in an academic society where it’s hard to tell who’s mind is being shaped.
Yet, there are a few safe places left, safe for your children and safe for free expression. Hillsdale College is one. Grove City College is another, and it’s the latter with which I’m most familiar. At GCC’s recent Center for Vision & Values conference, “Media and American Culture: How the #Church, #Ideas, #Elites, #Social Networks, and #Technology Shape Society,” GCC V&V those attending experienced a First Amendment sanctuary such as is not available on most campuses today.
Despite 3000 years of western cultural development regarding gender differences, though far from perfect, some high schools and nearly all colleges now bombard their students with LGBTQ manifestos, and although, as of 2014, 27% of millennials remained opposed to same-sex marriage (Pew Research), they’d better not say so out loud. In fact, they’d better not tout heterosexual preferences, deny climate change, or avow pro-life views.
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According to research by Dr. Marvin Folkertsma, retired Political Science Chair at Grove City College, for example, on September 1, 2015, academicians wrote an open letter to President Obama asking him to use the Department of Justice to prosecute corporations and other organizations that “knowingly deceived the American people about…climate change…” Climate Depot.
Former SOS Condoleezza Rice is not the only invited speaker at a university to be dis-invited because her presence would offend students and faculty, but Rutgers made itself famous for its ignorance. Folkertsma reported from Kirsten Powers’ The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech that the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has calculated 62 cancellations from 1987 to 2008, but reports an equal number for the five years from 2009-2014, culminating in Rice’s humiliation.
Wesleyan University felt it necessary to establish a special dorm for LGBTTQQGAGPBDSM students (I won’t waste your time with all of it) to combat what it calls the “dominant white-heterosexual tradition.” Roger Kimball in PJ Media.
Brandeis University, the motto of which is, “Truth even to its innermost parts” threw out its 2014 invitation to the globally famed heroine, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, staunch opponent of Islamist terrorism and fervent proponent of the rights of women, because she expressed views not supportive of homosexuality. WSJ Article.
State Media news manipulators are major players in all this. According to Tom O’Boyle, former staff writer for the WSJ, and currently a senior executive for the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, and teacher of advanced journalism classes at Carnegie Mellon University, research from the Poynter Institute shows that on the day SCOTUS’s Obergefell decision on same-sex marriage was rendered (June 26, 2015), only 14 of 50 state newspapers across the nation displayed journalistically balanced/unbiased coverage on their front pages above and below the fold. The fourteen did not include the New York Times, the motto for which can no longer be what Adolph Ochs envisioned: “Without Fear or Favor.”
Along with the work of O’Boyle, Folkertsma, and Kimball, Powers’ book cites many examples of the on-campus fascist behaviors of people like a professor at the University of California-Santa Clara who purportedly claimed the right to assault a sixteen year old girl handing out pro-life materials in a so-called free-speech protected zone, because the professor considered the young woman’s advocacy violent, which justified counter-violence to stamp out “offensive views.”
Each and all of these examples raise this question: Why would we send our children to any institution where some faculty and students are little more than brown-shirted thugs who see themselves as thought police to control those whom we love?
Because Americans are not as ignorant as State Media and its academic allies portray them, it is now easier to see why millions of Americans want change, why they are desperate for any tool or any candidate they think will take us to a place of decency and good sense. A partial reason, then, in support of O’Boyle’s recitation about the long decline of newsprint is that millennials, drive, thrive, and survive on the digital age, and people over 60 refuse to be force-fed the insanities of political correctness along with sports news and the obituaries. Now, do we understand the rise of a Donald Trump?
June 2015 marked the 800th anniversary of King John signing the Magna Carta, a foundation stone of western civilization’s evolution of ordered liberty. In 2016, can we keep the liberties some of our generation and so many before have died for?
Places like Grove City and Hillsdale, to name two, do not accept federal funding, and they are preserves of true intellectual freedom, havens for traditional mores and values Lincoln himself—and yes, Adolph Ochs and Justice Brandeis, too—held dear. Why not send our kids to places where their minds will be nurtured, where their freedoms will never die?
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