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Russia's Agenda

Putin believes that Russia was once a major actor (usually described as "feared") in international affairs. But it—that is, he—is no longer there. He believes that if he can reclaim some of the former Soviet Union's lost 100 million people and 30 percent of its area, his Russia will once again become a superpower—especially given the natural resources of his former Soviet states.

He understands that the longer some of these countries are Westernized and acculturated to popular culture's passions, the more difficult it will be to compel them into being Russian subjects. So Putin has a sense of urgency that was not always his devious signature in the past, but is now perhaps heightened by his age or health. Given his constant citations of NATO bombings on neighboring Serbia, the 2004 orange revolution, or the 2008 Ukrainian coup, U.N. Security Council Chairman Putin's rage at his alleged wounds is limitless.

He thinks we're decadent, soft, and spoiled to the point of not responding to his provocations. As a result, he presses. In his Stalinesque thinking, we do not deserve the power and influence we allegedly inherited at his expense, whereas his Russia, he boasts, is tough, pious, and deserves far more from the modern era than its current weakened status. He, like Stalin, has developed a visceral aversion to preaching Western elites, none of whom he believes can box, judo kick, fish, shoot, or ride bare-chested at his level.

So, to the extent that Putin believes, based on a cost-benefit analysis, that any envisioned attack will be profitable, he will invade wherever he believes the chances favor his goal. And if he does not see a deterrent from America or NATO, if oil is plentiful and cheap, and if Western leaders are serious and powerful rather than noisy and weak, he will not gamble. That's all there is to it. Putin will swallow up a torso if you feed him a hand.
Ukraine: Will It Survive?

Given the sheer odds against it, Ukraine should not last. Surprisingly, it appears to be unprepared for a huge invasion. Its roadways do not appear to be obstructed or mined. Putin has been massing forces since November, so why hasn't NATO flooded the country with armaments in late 2021 to ensure an infinite supply of anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles?

Still, we hope that the Russians will have a difficult time in Ukraine, if only because the country is greater in both size and population than Iraq. It has several supply routes across its borders with four NATO nations, allowing it to eventually begin receiving arms. An attacker who cannot prevent resupply from third-party neighbors will rarely be able to subjugate its target.

So, if Putin cannot shock and awe the elite or decapitate the government in a week, he will have a difficult time subduing the populace. He doesn't have much time on his side. Sanctions are meaningless in the short term, but they might bite afterwards.

His three-pronged semicircular attack on Ukraine is uncannily similar to Hitler's 1939 invasion of Poland from East Prussia, Germany, and a shattered Czechoslovakia. Even Hitler, who was later aided by the Soviet Union's invasion from the east, suffered 50,000 casualties from a poorly armed Polish army.

Fossil Fuels

A much of the current mess can be traced back to gas and oil, and the people who wanted to limit them. The nihilist Biden's voluntary cancellation of new pipelines, federal leases, ANWAR, and leverage loss of bank funding for fracking, as well as the loss of well over 2 million barrels of daily production, will be recognized as more than simply an economic calamity. It was a strategic blunder.

When Europe, or the West in general, is reliant on Russian goodwill to drive and keep warm, it will never be free. Ending American energy independence is more than simply AOC's passion. In January, Russian hackers targeted our Colonial pipeline, shutting down almost 1 million barrels of transported oil in a single day. The more we dismiss the strategic implications of having or not having oil, the more our adversaries focus on it.

I have a few questions for Joe Biden: Was the US pressing Russia to sell it more oil before he became office? Why was this the case after he assumed office?

Why did Biden blow up the country's reliance on energy? Couldn't Biden change his mind tomorrow and approve the Keystone pipeline, reverse his idiotic opposition to the EastMed pipeline, which will aid allies Cyprus, Greece, and Israel help other allies in southern Europe, and open up additional federal leasing to deliver liquid natural gas exports to Europe?

What is more moral, alienating Bernie Sanders and the team, or protecting our allies and ourselves from foreign attack? What's so ethical about following the green advise of billionaires like global jet-setter John Kerry at the expense of the middle classes, who can't afford to drive or heat their homes?

A Military Deterrent?

Consider the humiliation in Afghanistan, the withdrawal of $80 billion in arms and equipment, a $1 billion Kabul embassy, a multimillion-dollar refit of Bagram Airbase, the woke politicization of the Pentagon, the McCarthyite hunt within the ranks for white rage/supremacy, the inane rantings of retired admirals and generals, the revolving door of four-stars to defense contractor boards—and the military has lost a half-century

All of this and more has weakened the world's dread of the US military. We have almost completely demolished American trust in our own armed forces (only 45 percent of the Americans poll great confidence in the military). In addition to increasing pensions and social justice costs, the woke danger forces the defense budget to rely on genuine defense readiness. Our military's once-feared deterrence was eroded by our own top military and civilian leadership, not by enemies. Time is running out, and the adversaries are numerous. Can we find a brave soul to resurrect the military?
Goliath of America?

America may be awakening. It may believe it has moved beyond polluting fossil fuels and can flourish on wind, solar, and batteries. It may believe it is morally superior, and, like 19th-century pith-helmeted British foreign officers, it can preach to the globe about everything from pride flags and George Floyd murals in Kabul to no need for protection in Benghazi.

However, we are also buried in a $30 trillion debt. In order to make a mockery of inflation, we print $2 trillion per year. Our big cities are rife with crime, and the streets are medieval, with homeless people and sidewalk sewers. Race relations are at an all-time low.

We don't have a southern border. Nearly 50 million of our citizens were not born in the United States, posing a challenge at a time when we have given up on assimilation and integration. The awakened virus has distorted racial and ethnic relations and is undermining the concept of meritocracy. We are enslaved by Jacobin craziness, a top-down elite race to perdition. It is a thought crime to glorify America's past. The uneducated, who have no concept when the Civil War began, lecture the nodding that 1619, not 1776, was America's true establishment date.

In a nutshell, the America of 1990 no longer exists. To maintain our deterrence abroad, we must tighten our belts at home, pump oil and gas, begin to balance our budget, dismiss wokeism as a nihilistic pleasure, and re-calibrate our military.

NATO

NATO is now merely a figment of the imagination. It was created and exists in Europe to do three things: keep America in, Germany down, and Russia out. Germany is now on the rise. America has left. And Russia has agreed to participate.

The vast majority of alliance members followed Germany's anti-American lead and abandoned agreements to spend only 2% of their budgets on military preparation. It's strange that only hundreds of dead in Ukraine can quickly convince Germany's pompous leadership that their own performance-art pacifism kills.

Germany, NATO's richest and second-largest member, polls a desire to be closer to Russia rather than the US. Does this imply that they prefer Putin's invasion than NATO's resistance? Sixty percent of Germans polled expressed no inclination to honor NATO's Article Five mutual help clause, and hence would not seek to assist a fellow member in distress.

Germany, on its road to green Lalaland, rejected all warnings about buying $1 billion in natural gas per day from Putin. Consider the following absurdities: Germans no longer have a great deal of affection for Americans. They do, however, expect them to pay their defense and protect them against Russians, with whom they have lucrative energy accords. The latter will eventually force them to rely on Putin for 50% of their energy needs.

So, what exactly is NATO? In reality, about 25 of the 30 members of the nation are helpless. They rely on the US to safeguard them against enemies in their own country. Only Britain and France's NATO nuclear monopolies provide a deterrent umbrella over both NATO and the EU—on the quiet certainty that a considerably larger nuclear American umbrella covers all of them.

We should simply ask those who have agreed to meet their military responsibilities to stay, and the rest to go gently and peacefully, following the Swiss model. Why are there any combat forces from the United States in Germany? Are they there to defend the Nord Stream 2 pipeline against Russian attack? To commend Germany for spending less than 2% of its GDP on defense?

China

For five years, Americans were obsessed not only with Putin, but also with the left-wing myth that Russians were under all our beds—the tattooed, gap-toothed cruddy villains of Hollywood movies, the alleged Satanic colluders of the Steele dossier, the nefarious bankers who communicated with the White House at night. So, when we previously pitted dictatorship China against totalitarian Russia, we consciously threw up the old Russian triangulation card. The Kissingerian concept said that neither of them should ever grow closer to each other than they are to us. We abandoned up on all of it and instead hung on every word of Bob Mueller, James Comey, and the lunatics at CNN for two years.

Meanwhile, China created and concealed the roots of a virus that decimated the American economy and damaged our entire culture. Thousands of Chinese are here primarily to assist in the theft of US technical skills. Add in the Uighurs and the now-defunct Tibet, and China outdoes even Putin in terms of human rights violations. If Ukraine falls, Taiwan will be the West's third "lost" nation under Biden's presidency.

Mania on the Left

On cue, an embattled Left now proposes some bizarre explanations for why Putin invaded Crimea and eastern Ukraine in 2014, and again in 2022, while magically bookending Trump's four invasion-free years. We're told that the hiatus was caused by Putin getting everything he wanted from Trump and rewarding him by not attacking any of his neighbors.

Really?

Were Vladimir Putin and his advisors overjoyed that their dog Trump inundated the world with price-crashing oil? They were relieved that Trump had murdered Russian mercenaries in Syria?

Putin himself was pleased that the US had backed out of his own lucrative missile deal? Was he overjoyed that Trump sold previously prohibited US assault weaponry to Ukraine? Was the Kremlin overjoyed when Trump increased the US defense budget? Was Russia especially grateful that Trump bullied NATO into paying an additional $100 billion on defense? Did Putin applaud when Trump assassinated Soleimani and Baghdadi and blasted ISIS to oblivion?

We are now subjected to lectures from the ubiquitous former Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman, the political operative chastising America for its sluggish response to save his home Ukraine. All of this from one of the primary operatives in impeaching the one president who, unlike his progressive predecessor, armed Ukraine and sent it offensive weaponry embargoed by the Left, along with the Biden Burisma consortia.

The helpful Vindman may have been presented to Ukraine's Ministry of Defense. But he never realized that any society gullible enough to swallow the Left's false promises of autonomy and freedom legitimized by mere liberal decree will be abandoned by its utopian backers whenever a nearby powerful thug invades.

Biden

Now we hear that Biden has handled the problem admirably during his midterm campaign. Winston Biden has corn-popped "killer" Putin, metaphorically taken "the bully" behind the proverbial gym and given him a whopping, slammed his head on the global lunch counter, and in Biden's deterrent fashion, called him a chump, one of the dregs, a junkie, fat, and a lying dog-faced pony soldier—and topped it all off with "You ain't white!"

Joe threatened the harshest penalties in history, which were meant to prevent an invasion on Wednesday but were never meant to deter an invasion at all by Saturday. However, Biden vows a "discussion" someday to determine if he will continue to deliver the worst penalties in history. Until then, he offers Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy safe passage out of Kyiv—the easiest method to eliminate Ukraine's tenacious resistance.

Years of predatory Biden family profiteering in Ukraine have gone unmentioned, as has a decade of leftist passive-aggressive love and hatred of Russia, from obedient reset to greedy Uranium One to pathetic "tell Vladimir... " to insane vetoing of sanctions against the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

What a congested route to Kyiv.

While at peace and without a declaration of war, the Japanese Imperial Navy launched a militarily successful but strategically inept surprise attack on the US 7th Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on a Sunday morning. The attack, which was timed to coincide with subsequent bombing and invasions of the Philippines, British-controlled Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong, as well as some Pacific Islands, ensured not only an existential Pacific theater war between Japan and America, but also an existential Pacific theater war between Japan and the United States. It also precipitated the United States' participation into World War II's European theater on December 11, when both Italy and Nazi Germany declared war on America. If the latter had not done so, it is possible that the United States would have focused only on Japan and gotten Japan out of the war much sooner.

Revisionists frequently reference conspiracy theories that the Roosevelt administration enticed Japan into the war by restricting oil supplies to Tokyo (only five months before Pearl Harbor) or by recklessly relocating the 7th Fleet from San Diego to an intentionally exposed and poorly defended Pearl Harbor.

Such opposing viewpoints are unpersuasive since the one-sided source of tensions has been obvious to everybody for more than a decade. In 1931, Japan invaded Manchuria. In 1937, it invaded China's mainland, resuming the conflict. It annexed French colonial Indochina in September 1940. By 1940, the concept of a Japanese Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was circulating unofficially as a model for combining Japan's projected imperial wartime acquisitions of China and former British, American, French, and Dutch colonial holdings.

The mercantile system was envisioned as an Asian version of a would-be Napoleonic Europe, based on Japan's alleged racial superiority and the propagandistic and cynical notion that even harsher Japanese imperialism would be less resented by Asians in the Pacific than current Western nation-building colonialism. Given the Japanese mass civilian executions of captured Asians at Nanking, China, and the massacres that followed the takeover of Singapore, such crass propaganda was never taken seriously outside of Tokyo.

Loss of Deterrence

For most of the 1930s, Western nations had appeased and gave the Japanese war machine everything it needed. If racism played a role in the rising tensions, it was primarily the Japanese belief that their prosperous, industrialized nation was a natural reflection of their inherent racial superiority. If Japan overstated its might chauvinistically, the allies countered by downplaying the Japanese danger based on their own racialist ideas that any imitation of Western military technology, industry, and military organization could never match the originals.

In more pragmatic terms, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor because it had the capability to do so. Its fleet was greater than the 7th Fleet of the United States Pacific (though not by any means the entire U.S. Navy). In numerous categories of fighter aircraft, torpedoes, and ships, the Japanese Imperial Navy momentarily outperformed the American Navy in late 1941.

In the view of the Japanese, the US had also lost deterrence since it did nothing when Nazi Germany attacked its main allies, Britain and France, in 1940, the former bombed in fall 1940 and spring 1941, and the latter seized in seven weeks by the Wehrmacht in May 1940.

More specifically, Japan assumed that, with the German army stationed just a few kilometers from the outskirts of Moscow at the time of Pearl Harbor, the Soviet Union would collapse within days. Hitler would thus be free to build his continental dominion and quickly crush the remnants of the once-proud allied resistance. In other words, Japan estimated that if it could claim credit for the inevitable Axis triumph before the war ended, it would be able to seize as much as it could before the prizes were fought over and divided up.

Note that when the Germans signed a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union in August 1939—while Japan was fighting an allegedly common communist Russian opponent on the Mongolian border—they paid little attention to their de facto ally Japanese concerns.

When the Japanese reciprocated by signing their own nonaggression pact with Stalin in April 1941, just weeks before Operation Barbarossa, the Soviet Union was persuaded that it no longer needed to worry about a second front on its eastern borders and could focus all its resources on the German invader. After April 1941, Japan thought that, whatever the outcome of Germany's and Russia's ties, it could now focus only on the Anglo-Americans, particularly with its navy, which had caught up to British and American sea- and airpower.

All of these arguments were understandable for a hostile state seeking to expand an already powerful Asian Empire into the Pacific. However, such justifications were still based on erroneous reasoning, a racist misunderstanding of history, and a lack of understanding of the American people.

Tokyo had no real appreciation that the United States was already building a second fleet of modern carriers, battleships, cruisers, and submarines that would soon make the American navy larger than all the world’s fleets combined. Indeed, the Americans would launch over 145 aircraft carriers, including over 20 Essex fleet carriers, the most advanced in the world. 

Tokyo had no inkling that the anemic Depression-era American economy was capable of rapid expansionary growth. More specifically, the American gross natural product by late 1944 would outpace all five economies of the major combatants—Germany, Italy, Japan, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union—combined. 

Ignorance of Innate American Strength

The Americans and the British were the only two World War II countries having the global reach, lift, transport, and resources to effectively fight a two-front war, unlike the Germans, Japanese, or Soviets. Japan, on the other hand, would swiftly discover that its decade-long presence in China was an open wound that drew vital resources from its simultaneous battles with the United States and the United Kingdom.

In terms of the surprise assault on December 7, it is best viewed as the worst of all worlds—conducted well enough to do damage and hence provoke American outrage, but not so much as to impair America's ability to wage war or terrify the American public into submission.

A formidable Japanese Imperial Navy carrier task force traveled undiscovered 4,000 miles to Hawaii, capable of launching 350 combat aircraft from its six fleet carriers. The fleet's ability to travel such a long distance without radio communication and in severe seas at the start of winter, while avoiding all military and trade ships, demonstrated true tactical brilliance.

The procedure itself went off without a hitch. Two waves of carrier-based torpedo and dive bombers sunk five battleships of the US 7th fleet at daybreak on a Sunday morning. Four others were critically injured as a result of the incident. Over 2,300 American sailors and soldiers were slain by the Japanese during a time of peace. The Japanese fleet made it back to Japan safely. There were just 29 aircraft lost, as well as five tiny one-man submarines.

Again, even if tactically brilliant, the Pearl Harbor attack would be a catastrophic strategic failure for Japan. The Japanese navy blocked suggestions for urgently required third and fourth air strikes—necessary to destroy U.S. oil storage and repair shops in the Pacific harbor facilities—so it failed to shut down the port at Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor was receiving 7th Fleet ships within days.

The Pacific fleet's three American aircraft carriers stationed at Pearl—Enterprise, Lexington, and Saratoga—were out to sea on December 7 and so safe for the Japanese. Six months later, at the Conflict of the Coral Sea, Lexington's dive bombers would help sink a Japanese carrier and damage others before being lost in the battle. Both the Enterprise and the Saratoga would survive the war and engage in numerous crucial Pacific battles.

If the captains of the relatively old and slow American battleships of Battleship Row had received advance word of the Japanese approach and steamed out to meet the attackers without air cover, American casualties could have been ten times higher—given that all eight battleships would have likely been sunk on the high seas well before reaching the Japanese fleet.

As a result, the Japanese provoked—but did not substantially harm—the one worldwide force capable of not only defeating them, but also dismantling their faraway empire and destroying the Japanese mainland.

What If?

Were there any other strategic options for the war-hungry Japanese? Plenty. European colonial presence in the Pacific was generally minimal or non-existent by 1941. This fact provided the Japanese with possibilities for acquiring resources without having to go to war with the US.

Since June 1940, the triumphant Germans have occupied both France and the Netherlands. Even if the Japanese had simply expanded their newly acquired Indochina concessions—appropriated from the Vichy French in 1940—grabbed the equally orphaned oil-rich Dutch East Indies, and been content with conquering resource-rich, British-held Malaysia and its fortress port at Singapore—while avoiding Pearl Harbor and the Philippines—there would have been little chance of the US joining the conflict even then.

Instead, the Pearl Harbor attack enraged and woke up the Americans to launch the largest economic and industrial renaissance in history to that time. Just four months after Pearl Harbor, the United States had bombed Tokyo with Jimmy Doolittle’s carrier-based medium bombers. Note that at no time did the Japanese Imperial Navy have the ability to bomb any major U.S. continental city. By August 1942 American forces were on the offensive at Guadalcanal and were already gearing up for a two-pronged island-hopping trajectory to Tokyo.   

In contrast to the very instantaneous Anglo-American cooperative preparation in December 1941, Adolf Hitler was completely astonished by the Japanese strike and was not consulted about it. Indeed, Hitler appears to have had little or no knowledge of the location of Pearl Harbor. Nonetheless, he was overjoyed with the news, especially considering his unhappiness with the Kreigemarine's surface fleet's poor performance.

Nazi Germany erroneously expected that Japan would encircle and destroy the British and American Pacific fleets, diverting alliance forces to Asia and the Pacific. Above all, the newly enlarged assault on America was planned to allow Nazi U-boats to finally sink American trade ships bound for the United Kingdom as soon as they departed their East Coast ports.

Instead, all Hitler earned from Pearl Harbor was an enemy more powerful than his existing opponents and an enemy alliance with huge manpower and economic resources. The new Allies—Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States—enjoyed collectively a population double that of the Axis nations, vastly more natural resources, and three times more men and women in arms. 

The Yamamoto Myth

Admiral Yamamoto, the mastermind behind the assault on Pearl Harbor, is sometimes romanticized as a mythological, almost reluctant warrior who knew all along that the operation would awaken a sleeping monster. As a result, he accepted the fact that he would only be able to run wild for six months before being overrun by American industry, technology, and righteous outrage. Yamamoto, according to this historically flawed account, was a tragic hero tasked with devising an unachievable plan for defeating a much larger and stronger United States.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Yamamoto himself agitated for the surprise Pearl Harbor attack. And he even threatened to resign if a skeptical General Tojo and Emperor Hirohito did not grant him a blank check to bomb the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Hawaii, a diversion of resources many in the Japanese military felt was unjustified, especially with the ongoing and increasingly expensive quagmire in China.

While the Japanese army lacked the firepower, armor, and mobility of Western ground forces, Yamamoto successfully claimed that Tokyo's imperial air and naval power had already attained parity—both in terms of the quality of their weapons and the quantity of ships, aircraft, sailors, and airmen.

In terms of 1941-era weapons, Japan was frequently superior to both the Americans and the British—at least if it attacked before the two Western countries had completely rearmed. Yamamoto felt that by winning, the devastated Americans would be discouraged from attacking a new broad Japanese Pacific empire. Washington was rumored to be considering suing for a ceasefire, acknowledging Japan's former colonial holdings.

To summarize, the strategic folly of a stunning but short-lived triumph at Pearl Harbor was partly explained by Yamamoto's immense ego, tactical skill, and strategic incapacity, as well as Japanese pride. To be fair, no student of military readiness, economic resources, or social organization could have predicted that a relatively vulnerable and isolationist United States, still reeling from recurring cycles of depression, would fight simultaneously across the Pacific and Europe with a 12 million-strong military, the world's largest economy, and the world's most formidable weapons, including Essex class fleet carriers and Balao submarines, in less than four years.

All of this happened 80 years ago this December, when a sophisticated Japanese Empire made the mistake of attacking the United States during peace.

Many of our once revered and most hallowed institutions are failing us. To mention only the most significant ones: our top-ranking military echelon, the leadership of our federal investigatory and intelligence agencies, the government medical establishment—and of course the universities.

For too long American higher education’s reputation of global academic superiority has rested mostly on the sciences, mathematics, physics, technology, medicine, and engineering—in other words, not because of the humanities and social sciences, but despite them. The humanities have become too often anti-humanistic. And the social sciences are deductively anti-scientific. Both quasi-religious woke disciplines have eroded confidence in colleges and universities, infected even the STEM disciplines and professional schools, and torn apart the civic unity of the United States. Indeed, much of the current Jacobin revolution was birthed and fueled by American universities, despite their manifest hypocrisies and derelictions.

Never in U.S. history have elite universities piled up such huge endowments, which soared during the lockdown. Harvard has $40 billion, Yale $30 billion, Stanford $28 billion, Princeton $25 billion and so on. The tax-free income from these huge sums ensures equally extravagant budgets that are somewhat insulated from market realities—at least in the sense that the larger endowments grew, the more likely university costs rose beyond the annual rate of inflation, and the greater aggregate student debt rose.

Just as importantly, spending per pupil is rarely calibrated to whether graduating students leave better educated than when they arrived—the ostensible purpose of universities.

There are certainly no “exit tests” for certification of the BA degree, in the manner of, say, a bar exam, that might set a minimum national standard for any acquisition of knowledge. Such standardized reassurance would rescue the BA degree from the growing general public perception that the campus has become politically warped, therapeutic, a poor measure of real knowledge, and is now largely a cattle brand of a sort that qualifies its holder for some sort of non-physical labor.

The result over the last few years of this relatively new higher-education marriage of big money and radical ideas is a strange disconnect. On the one hand, never have elite (though often indebted) college students been so demanding of apartment-style dorm living, latte bars, and rock-climbing walls, while virtue signaling their compensatory proletariat bona fides.

Never have universities been more able financially to subsidize and guarantee their own student loans. And yet they have outsourced that responsibility to federal guaranteed student loan programs. The result of that moral hazard of never being held accountable for rampant inflationary spikes in tuition, room, and board costs, is that universities over the last 30 years spent like drunken sailors on non-essentials: from diversity czars to in loco parentis therapeutic “centers” to Club Med accommodations—even as at the core test scores dived, grade inflation soared, and graduates increasingly did not impress employers.

So, universities themselves are largely responsible for the current $1.7 trillion in aggregate student college debt. Such a staggering encumbrance is not just the concern of higher education, but affects the entire country in manifest ways, well aside from emboldening our global rivals and enemies. Even communist China is spending far more of their higher education budgets on the sciences, math, and liberal arts than therapeutics, social justice crusades, and diversity, equity, and inclusion audits.

Students with tens of thousands of dollars in student loan obligations are likely to marry later, delay child rearing, cannot purchase a home in their 20s or even 30s, and more easily slide into prolonged adolescence. The country itself is experiencing a glut of the over- but not necessarily well-educated: history’s menu for radicalized and angry youth who feel they are properly credentialed with various letters after their names but suspect they lack the training and skills to enter the workforce, be productive, and earn commensurate good pay.

There is also something terribly wrong about well-compensated, tenured professors of the social sciences and humanities—whose own lives are conventionally materialist and bourgeoise—spooning out the usual radical race/class boilerplate to indebted students who in a sense have borrowed heavily to pay a large percentage of faculty salaries.

Few of today’s woke 20-somethings will graduate with rigorous instruction in language, logic, and the inductive methods with a shared knowledge of literature, history, science, and math. At far less cost, they would likely find better online classes in those now ossified subjects than in the courses that they went into hock in order to finance.

Never in U.S. history has the university been so at odds with not just the general pulse of America, but with its major traditions, institutions, and very Constitution. Most recently, Americans have been urged by university law schools and political science departments to eliminate the 233-year-old Electoral College, to pack the Supreme Court after 150 years of a nine-justice bench, to end the 180-year filibuster, to admit two new states to gain four progressive senators, and to question the constitutional cornerstone of two senators per state.

It is chiefly the university that scolds Americans that their customs, traditions, and laws have little moral weight, that they are merely constructs reflecting “white supremacy,” detached from either a natural law common to all humans or customs carefully cross-examined and honed after decades and even centuries of use in the public square.

Once abstract campus theorizing about open borders, hiring and admissions based on race, zero bail even for repeat felons, critical-legal-theory district attorneys, and Green New Deal energy policies have now all seeped out to warp the daily lives of Americans.

Yet unlike free speech movements of the 1960s, in 2021 it is the university that now wars on the First Amendment, castigating unwelcome expression as “hate speech” if found inconvenient for its agendas.

It is the university where the relevant amendments to the Constitution governing due process and confronting one’s accusers is jettisoned when the accused is of the wrong gender or race or both. It is the university that has renounced the legacy of the civil rights movement of the 1960s that once championed open housing, desegregation, and racially blind criteria.

Instead, many colleges now allow students (at least those self-identified as “marginalized”) to pick their dormitory roommates on the basis of race, to declared certain areas of campus racially segregated “safe spaces,” and to discriminate in student admissions and faculty hiring. If Martin Luther King, Jr. were to return to Harvard, Yale, or Stanford and to repeat verbatim the speech I heard (at age 11) that he gave in 1965 at San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral, about equality, shared humanity, and the need to excel at whatever task one takes on, regardless of his station (“Be the best of whatever you are”), he would likely be jeered and derided as an integrationist and assimilationist.

One final irony? From the university we hear calls to either end or reform radically our major institutions and cultural referents: recalibrate the First and Second Amendments, scrap the border, tear down that statue, rename this plaza, do away with existing classes of gender pronouns, heckle speakers, and destroy the lives of unwoke faculty. And yet from such critical faculty scolds, there is oddly zero self-criticism or indeed any self-reflection of their own shortcomings.

Do academics ponder over why the reputations of their universities are eroding in the public mind? What exactly is the campus responsibility for graduating students with bleak job possibilities and unsustainable debt? Why is the clueless 21-year-old graduate now the stock joke of popular culture and comedy? How did the enlightened institutionalize a two-tier system of privileged tenured grandees resting on the backs of exploited contingent and part-time faculty? Why are critics of a supposedly non-transparent American society so secretive about their own admissions, hiring, and budgetary policies? And how did the locus of cheap anti-corporate boilerplate become so deeply reliant on siphoning corporate cash?

The racialized civil strife of 2020-21, and indeed the entire woke and cancel-culture revolutions originated ultimately from campus fixtures who never suffer the real-life consequences of their abstractions. And meanwhile, China, the greatest threat that the United States has faced in 30 years, smiles at our universities’ importation of most of the bankrupt and suicidal ideas abroad, from Frankfurt School nihilism and Foucauldian postmodern relativism to Soviet sclerosis and Maoist cultural revolutionary suicide.

Unless the university itself is rebooted, its rejection of meritocracy, its partisan venom, its tribalism, its war with free speech and due process, and its inability to provide indebted students with competitive educations will all ensure that it is not just disliked and disreputable but ultimately irrelevant and replaceable.