I was once a brainless student. By that I mean I was heavily involved in all the radical left nostrums and ideologies. But I was a bit younger than most in this regard. The radicalism of the 60s in the US was mainly happening among college students. But all my radicalism took place while I was in high school.
From around the age of 15 to 18 I was fully into the hardcore left. But a few months after graduating from high school I became a Christian, so that quickly brought to a close my dalliance with Marxism, the New Left, the drug culture, the hippy scene, the New Age Movement (as it would later be called), and all the rest.
But as I look back at my stint of being on the hard left, I see how utterly wrong and utterly out to sea I was on just about everything. Even my more compassionate moments of thinking I was helping the poor and needy was so obscured by leftist rhetoric and delusion that I could not see that the things I was supporting actually harmed people rather than helped them.
Socialism was NOT the answer for the world’s impoverished masses. The free market is what lifted millions of people out of grinding poverty. And I look back now and cringe when I had such rose-coloured glasses on that I actually thought Cuba, Communist China or the USSR were somehow paradises on earth. I could not have been more wrong.
Three things that I came upon today all tie in with this, so let me share them. The first was a terrific meme found on the social media. It showed a poster taped to a city wall with these words:
We are hiring!
-Naïve college students needed to serve as human shields for ongoing terror campaign.
-No experience, skills, or intelligence necessary.
-Foreign travel required.
Contact: Hamas Inhuman Relations Dept
tunnelvermin@deathcult.com
Yep, quite right. And we can begin with all the “Queers for Palestine” idiots. They still have tall buildings over there in the Middle East – ideal for tossing these useful idiots off to their death. Hint: Islam does NOT take a high view of homosexuality!
The second item was a piece in an online newspaper. It begins this way:
Chicago has become so unpleasant that migrants are fleeing back to Venezuela after being dumped in shelters and refused better paying jobs. Since August last year, 20,700 migrants have arrived in Chicago from Texas. The Lone Star State’s Governor Greg Abbott sent migrants to Chicago and other Democrat-run cities because of their proud status as ‘sanctuary cities.’ They offer enhanced protection against detention or deportation for undocumented migrants.
Now, Illinois’ harsh winters, lack of migrant infrastructure, and ambivalent support from locals has made many people, who undertook the harsh US-Mexico border journey, actually turn around and go back home. Venezuela-born Michael Castejon, 39, and his family have been sleeping on the floors of police stations and shelters after he could not afford to pay rent in Chicago – because his work permit was taking so long to arrive.
The family was renting an apartment through a city voucher program, that gives up to $15,000 for up to six months of rental assistance – but once it ran out, they had to give up their living space. The dad found a job in construction, and he was getting paid in cash, but it wasn’t enough to sustain his family since they arrived in June. After five months of rough living with no end in sight, the family decided to pack up their belongings and return to South America, realizing that ‘there’s nothing here for us.’
Ha! Venezuela is of course a socialist hellhole where the masses are starving. But Chicago – a Democrat-run hellhole where out of control crime, cronyism and wokeism, and urban decay and rot are at an all-time high – is clearly no better, so these folks are leaving. What a hoot!
The third item is a recent piece penned by Daniel Greenfield titled “‘Dumb College Kids’ Have Been Supporting Mass Murder for a Hundred Years”. It is such a ripper of a piece that I will share it in its entirety:
***
One of the people watching college students cheer Hamas and tear down posters of kidnapped Israeli children commented that this was not just “dumb kids wearing Che t-shirts”.
But it is.
The ‘dumb college kids wearing Che t-shirts” were supporting mass murder, atrocities and ethnic cleansing in Latin America. They were cheering on the murder of women and children. And an international Communist movement responsible for the deaths of millions.
Before they were supporting Hamas, they were backing BLM while cities burned, streets filled with broken glass and people were violently assaulted. And before BLM, there was Mumia Abu Jamal and the Gitmo terrorists, further back there were the Sandinistas, the PLO, the Weathermen, the BLA and the Viet Cong. And before them Mao and the Bolsheviks.
‘Dumb college kids’ have been supporting the mass murder of millions for at least a century.
There is something different here.
Never before have the atrocities been as graphically documented with so many videos taken by the monsters themselves committing their crimes that were broadly distributed in graphic and gory detail to the public in ways that could not be censored or suppressed.
The victims of Marxist dictatorships or the Soviet Union and China were mostly faceless figures, sometimes caught in grainy black and white photos, often with no names or backstories. Here there are full color photos and videos, personal stories of families, mothers and children, and the elderly, all looking from the ‘Kidnapped’ posters being torn down from college campus walls.
But the smiling children looking back from the posters might as well have been kulaks in Russia or intellectuals in Cambodia for all the empathy they elicited. Seeing them only infuriates college kids busy righteously advocating for Hamas as a queer liberation movement. It spoils their plans for a class walkout while chanting, “Free Palestine” and waving their puny fists in the air conditioned air.
Hamas understood that documenting its atrocities would make it more appealing, not only to fellow Islamists, but also to leftists. The ‘dumb college kids’ aren’t alienated by atrocities, they’re drawn to them. And it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the last century to think otherwise.
The dumb college kids may be dumb, but so was your average Nazi goose stepper or Bolshevik thug. The mobs who clamored to see heads roll around the guillotine were not geniuses. But much like the Gaza civilians that crossed the fence to take part in the murder and rape, they know what they like. And what they like is chaos, violence and seeing things burn.
Your average dumb college kid isn’t born evil because she misses BLM rallies and traded in her black power fist banner for a PLO flag, but neither were the German teens who filled stadiums to listen to Hitler or their Chinese counterparts who giggled while their teachers were beaten during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. As Alinsky said, “a good tactic is one your people enjoy.” And, “If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.”
Consequences are things that come along later. Some people grow up enough to realize that they had been part of something monstrous.
“It was quite fun,” a former Red Guard member recalled. Then she was actually told to beat people and ran away. “God bless me, I didn’t beat anyone back then. If I had beaten anyone how could I have lived with myself all these years?”
Some of the college kids cheering Hamas now may have their moments of reckoning. Or not.
But dismissing them as just ‘dumb college kids’ is how campus extremism becomes softened, normalized and even celebrated. Decades of pop culture turned seventies domestic terrorists into activists who never meant to hurt anyone and were just upset about the Vietnam War. Che went from a symbol of mass murder and repression to slightly edgy youthful rebellion. The old Communists were idealists who wanted to make America into a just and equal society.
These are some of the examples that today’s campus radicals cite when arguing that history will vindicate them. Eventually the bodies are buried and the radical artists and writers turn out to be much more important than all the dead in Russia, China, Cuba and Cambodia. Everyone can name Ernest Hemingway and Noam Chomsky, but who can name a million corpses?
Supporting mass murder isn’t a phase. It’s evil.
The Hitler Youth weren’t just ‘dumb kids’ even if they were dumb kids. Patronizingly dismissing leftist extremism as a phase or a coming of age ritual normalizes our version of the Hitler Youth. And then we wonder at the spectacle of crowds of college kids cheering “armed resistance” against the ‘Zionist occupiers” and wonder over how they could possibly do such things.
What do we think has been the norm on college campuses for at least 50 years?
Liberals utterly failed to draw a red line with the Left. The constant dismissals of leftists as passionate but misguided, as having the right views but the wrong tactics, led to this. The liberals fell to the Left. And then the most extreme parts of the Left cannibalized the rest. College campuses, always radical, became nests of the most extreme politics in the country.
Dismissing all of this as ‘dumb college kids’ or ‘youthful passion’ is how we got here.
An 18-year-old, never mind a 22-year-old, is old enough to go fight a war, yet we act as if he has no moral agency because we’ve accepted the idea that college is a time to test out political extremism. Or at least leftist adjacent political extremism. (College kids advocating for white supremacist groups don’t meet with the same kind of tolerance as advocating for Hamas.)
Morality doesn’t come from the absence of standards, but the insistence on them.
Americans spend countless billions each year subsidizing higher education. We deserve more from universities and from their graduates. What we are seeing is not just an immediate failure, but a century of betrayal by academia which has been serving up apologetics for politically correct mass murder since the days of Lenin and Stalin. When its views are unpopular, it hides behind free speech, and when it feels its strength, it purges dissenting students and professors.
The greatest extremist threat in this country isn’t coming from a few KKK members living in trailer parks, but from the nation’s most prestigious Ivy League universities. It’s time for either academia to rethink its relationship to political extremism or for the country to rethink its relationship to a system of higher education that teaches students to support mass murder.
Yep, we sure have a lot of college students who could do us all a real favour and deport themselves to Gaza or Havana or Caracas or Pyongyang. It just might wake a few of them up.
11 Replies to “Save Us from Those Brainless Woke Students”
My Dad (may he RIP) would always call them rent-a-crowd.
Professional activists with velcro patches so they can efficiently switch causes and black N95 masks to justify hiding their faces.
I am sure there are some agencies that provide these imbeciles to causes for a tidy sum.
“Send us your money so we can hire people to protest in your stead.”
Quite right Peter.
I love hearing you write about this Bill as I too was once one of the very woke radical left way back then! But at a much later age than you.. I started at the age of 21. I went to university here in WA with serious intentions of study however I became involved in the ‘counter culture’ which set me off on a path of searching that led to my eventual unexpected conversion at the age of 30. I read fairly widely and along similar paths as you so it’s always interesting to read about your journey.
Many thanks Penny. So glad you found your way out of the leftist dark hole and into the light of Christ.
Dumb kids. LOL. That was insightful. I used to think that people are obviously taking longer to mature these days, so maybe the voting age should be raised to 25 or 30. But according to this article, some people never mature.
Seems that way Tim.
Dynamite stuff, Bill.
I’m glad you heard the Lord’s call as early as you did. He used your young and brief gambit into Socialism to great advantage.
I pray that all of us who follow you will share your thoughts and insights far and wide.
Thanks Marc.
I’m glad I wasn’t drinking a cup of tea when I read you post title – “I too was once a clueless woke wonder”. I would laughed the tea up my nose. There is something refreshing about telling people how pathetic we were before we met Jesus. It’s not a mocking laugh, but a laugh of “Oh I know how you feel. Once you know God likes you, it is easy to face ourselves in reality. Pathetic. But loved. So how can you lose?
Thanks Tim.
And… me AGAIN! I’ve been mulling over Dainel Greenfield’s trek through history, then kept going back further – to the youths teasing Elisha “Go on up you baldhead”, and the crowd manipulating Pilate “crucify him, crucify him”, and the useful idiots laughing at the Pharasee’s jokes about Jesus as he was dying on the cross “Come down from the cross, then we will believe you are God’s son”. It looks like the Bible list of useful idiots would be quite substantial!
My Dad (may he RIP) would always call them rent-a-crowd.
Professional activists with velcro patches so they can efficiently switch causes and black N95 masks to justify hiding their faces.
I am sure there are some agencies that provide these imbeciles to causes for a tidy sum.
“Send us your money so we can hire people to protest in your stead.”
Quite right Peter.
I love hearing you write about this Bill as I too was once one of the very woke radical left way back then! But at a much later age than you.. I started at the age of 21. I went to university here in WA with serious intentions of study however I became involved in the ‘counter culture’ which set me off on a path of searching that led to my eventual unexpected conversion at the age of 30. I read fairly widely and along similar paths as you so it’s always interesting to read about your journey.
Many thanks Penny. So glad you found your way out of the leftist dark hole and into the light of Christ.
Dumb kids. LOL. That was insightful. I used to think that people are obviously taking longer to mature these days, so maybe the voting age should be raised to 25 or 30. But according to this article, some people never mature.
Seems that way Tim.
Dynamite stuff, Bill.
I’m glad you heard the Lord’s call as early as you did. He used your young and brief gambit into Socialism to great advantage.
I pray that all of us who follow you will share your thoughts and insights far and wide.
Thanks Marc.
I’m glad I wasn’t drinking a cup of tea when I read you post title – “I too was once a clueless woke wonder”. I would laughed the tea up my nose. There is something refreshing about telling people how pathetic we were before we met Jesus. It’s not a mocking laugh, but a laugh of “Oh I know how you feel. Once you know God likes you, it is easy to face ourselves in reality. Pathetic. But loved. So how can you lose?
Thanks Tim.
And… me AGAIN! I’ve been mulling over Dainel Greenfield’s trek through history, then kept going back further – to the youths teasing Elisha “Go on up you baldhead”, and the crowd manipulating Pilate “crucify him, crucify him”, and the useful idiots laughing at the Pharasee’s jokes about Jesus as he was dying on the cross “Come down from the cross, then we will believe you are God’s son”. It looks like the Bible list of useful idiots would be quite substantial!