How did America get to the point that elected officials can confidently defend looting and rioting and call for the abolishment of law enforcement without fearing the punishment of the electorate – because they know that there are a lot of voters, and even risk-averse corporations that will support them?

That there will be a point where many of the nation’s top news outlets would publish defenses of rioting, looting and arson and even describe a melee resulting in deaths, multiple assaults, millions in damaged property and burned buildings as “mostly peaceful?” That journalism would become among the most censorious and iron fisted conformity enforcing professions?

The reality is that this shouldn’t be a surprise. We saw it coming. We even laughed and shared wry smiles as it approached like an oncoming train.

I don’t think anyone is smiling anymore. We all know that these people would form the backbone of a Biden Administration – no matter how “centrist” he is made to appear.

And to a wo/man, these people would be touting credentials from some of the nation’s most prestigious universities, where they were carefully indoctrinated into toxic beliefs that glorify violence, hatred of their own country, intolerance of dissent, and rejection of empiricism, logic and reason.

And this is the result of Classical Liberals’ and Conservatives’ wholesale abandonment of Academia. Not only did we walk away, we smugly chortled as the Left took over, purged and consolidated their dominance – becoming more and more extreme in an environment with zero pushback or challenges to their ideas.

There is a pipeline that takes certain attitudes and beliefs from the campus to the culture at large, and Conservatives have been asleep at the switch, in many cases, unwilling to get down and dirty to fix what we knew is clearly broken.

For decades, Stanley Kurtz has been tirelessly sounding the alarm about what’s going on on college campuses, and what it portends for America that its institutions of higher learning are churning out graduates that have nothing but disdain and contempt for its founding principles.

The typical response in comment sections over that time was “Just wait till they leave school, get jobs and start paying taxes {guffaw!}”. Followed by the always fashionable “Who cares?” and, particularly after something truly egregious happens, there was always at least one effete idiot who will sashay over and sniff “The remedy is to ignore it.”

20 years later, and Kurtz has been proven right … A worryingly large number have not only not grown out of it, they’ve taken over most of the nation’s major cultural institutions, and many are now ensconced in positions of real power, many of them getting elected spouting the very same toxic nonsense we were so confident they’ll grow out of. And they’re successfully breeding more of themselves.

It’s time the Right turns its attention to higher education. Mitchell Langbert of the National Association of Scholars sampled “8,688 tenure track, Ph.D.–holding professors from fifty-one of the sixty-six top ranked liberal arts colleges in the U.S. News 2017 report”, in which approximately 5200 were either registered Republicans or Democrats.

His results?

The political registration of full-time, Ph.D.-holding professors in top-tier liberal arts colleges is overwhelmingly Democratic.

Indeed, faculty political affiliations at 39 percent of the colleges in my sample are Republican free—having zero Republicans. The political registration in most of the remaining 61 percent, with a few important exceptions [i.e. the Service Academies], is slightly more than zero percent but nevertheless absurdly skewed against Republican affiliation and in favor of Democratic affiliation.

Thus, 78.2% of the academic departments in my sample have either zero Republicans, or so few as to make no difference.

Clearly, something needs to be done.

The smoke arising from multiple cities across the land is a direct result of radical “professors” teaching crackpot theories that cannot withstand the barest minimum of critical scrutiny, that not only actively reject logic and empirical examination but rationalizes smear campaigns and violence against anyone who would challenge them.

And that’s not counting the wholesale cultural vandalism that has invaded the nation’s major institutions and past times. Nothing has escaped it; journalism, sports, food, religion, cartoons, entertainment, literature, medicine, science, engineering … even knitting.

What’s to be done? My idea is for Republican State Legislators and Governors go in like a bull in a china shop; It’s Time Republicans Confront The Left’s Takeover Of Academia.

For those who would acknowledge that something is wrong but fret and wring their hands about “academic freedom”, the fact of the matter is that ship has sailed; colleges and universities today are where free speech and inquiry, and due process, are now practically foreign concepts.

Students and even professors have been punished for researching the “wrong” topic, observing the “wrong” phenomenon, challenging the “wrong” cause, wearing the “wrong” clothes, reading the “wrong” book, expressing the “wrong” opinion, even eating the “wrong” food.

The time for the subtle, patient, non-confrontational, controversy avoiding, even respectful approach (if it were ever possible) was over a very long time ago.