THE GREAT BROWN-OUT

   When the United States became an independent country, there were a few mostly parochial private universities in the country, mainly in New England. Europe had a near monopoly on higher education. Thomas Jefferson started the University of Virginia because he realized that foreign control of education would be dangerous to the United States in the long run; and our Founding Fathers generally believed that educated electorate was essential to a self-governing Republic. The private universities responded, and from the mid-19th to the mid-20th Century, American colleges and universities were recognized even in Europe as among the world's best.

   Much of this changed during the mid-1960s, after the demand for colleges exploded because of American men's desire to evade service in the Vietnam War. The sudden influx of cash, lack of any political oversight, and high demand led to our colleges becoming a commercial enterprise with corresponding lower admissions standards and inflated tuition prices. It wasn't long before mercenary academics and wily ideological fanatics found that by clubbing together, they could keep the advantages of learning and knowledge to themselves, to be dealt out to the highest bidders on Wall Street and the US Deep State at whatever price they commanded while lending their expertise to perpetuating the ignorance and Scientistic superstitions among the general public. Hence the flood of paid pundits, credentialed con-men, tenure-jockeys, and revolving-door 'elites' who've plagued us ever since. 

   Now, Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island was once one of the nation's top universities. Like many others in its class today, Brown essentially is a very overpriced diploma mill which has coasted on its past laurels. It hasn't produced any alumni of any distinction in decades, and appears to have become something of a repository for wealthy families to send offspring who are trained for social and political activism, being unsuited for any productive occupations. Overseeing Brown's boated $6.5 billion budget is their president, a very mediocre economist by profession, a significant Democratic Party donor, and general gadfly around public policy named Christina Paxson. 

      Brown University managed to hit a new low this week, with their campus newspaper reporting that nearly 2 in 5 of the students enrolled there "identify as LGBTQ," apparently tripling the already too high percentage of a decade ago. Shocking as this number may sound, there are actually colleges with higher percentages, although not as well-known as Brown. While some of this has been questioned as Gay Mafia strong-arming 'peer pressure' it doesn't reflect actual numbers showing that 1 in 14 adult Americans are involved with the lifestyle. This includes 1 in 5 Americans between ages 15-25. So, in fairness, the problem isn't unique to Brown University, although Brown's numbers certainly should serve as a wake-up call to largely brain-dead American parents and to Conservative activists. However much the Conservative punditocracy would like to, we can't really blame any of this on illegal immigration, the Communist Party of China, or Hunter Biden; because it's been building up to this now for some time. 

    A little over a century ago, Sigmund Freud---now relegated to Dead White Male status lest any researcher starts drawing socially unacceptable conclusions from his writings---discovered that his patients during psychoanalysis began looking upon the doctor as an authority figure---which Freud concluded was seen as a substitute parent figure by the patient. Actually, this phenomenon was well-known to medical doctors and religious clergymen long before Freud, but Freud was the first to study it in-depth, and called the process transference. Given the social and political turmoil in early 20th Century Europe, it wasn't long before several of Freud's students began drawing a parallel between the breakdown of the European family structure and the susceptibility of the younger people to identify with powerful political leaders and what we would call today, social influencers. The degeneracy of the Weimar Republic and 1920s cultural sewers like Paris and Vienna were ideal social laboratories to test this theory out. 

   Institutions like Brown University are following the same pattern. Young adults who had little to no spiritual or cultural guidance growing up see in these 'woke' academic demagogues the moral authority figures they never had as children. What's worse is that these demagogues are reinforced by government and media 'experts' who---unlike a competent psychotherapist---preach to them a future utopia where workers and farmers sing for joy in factory and field, and State and Big Business guarantee an eternal childhood free of responsibility and care. 

  The homosexual lifestyle---which is psychologically rooted in prepubescent fixations---naturally forms part of the appeal of the overall regressive social vision. Many of the aforementioned psychologists saw this dynamic played out later; noting the undertones of sexual perversion inherent in the totalitarian regimes which later rose in Europe, alongside their leaders' promises of a paternalistic State. Of course, the paternalistic State also has to guarantee the security of their collective 'family' by suppressing elements of outsiders who are disruptive to order and discipline; but that aspect of the whole scheme is prudently keep out of sight and in the postmodern era usually enforced by mob psychology, or 'Cancel Culture.' 

   The Third Rail when subjects like these come up in Conservative discourse is assigning responsibility where it actually belongs: the failure of American parents and political leaders to stop it before it came to this point. It's not as though there wasn't ample warning that families were failing; and that media and academia aimed at children increasingly were becoming radicalized long before Drag Queen Story Hours and Critical Race Theory became part of the 'new normal.' I well recall that during the 90s and 00s that a common talking-point among Conservative pundits was that traditional Conservatives tended to be more focused on home and family than social activism. History doesn't seem to have borne this out; it would seem instead that the majority of them were just as apathetic towards one as towards the other. 

   As a side note, I never bought into that baloney: I was in a position to observe how phony most Conservative/Churchian family values were in actual practice. Today, we're reaping the consequences of all of that hypocrisy and neglect---or, more accurately, the younger generations of Americans are. The younger people desperately need to stop playing follow-the-herd and start thinking like adults or their future is going to end in a disaster.