Colleges and universities are on the frontlines of the culture wars. Conservatives have been losing ground on that front decade after decade. They have lost many battles, but the war is still up for grabs.
According to a 2020 National Association of Scholars report, the vast majority of college professors are leftists.
If that’s too vague, a mere “6% of campus administrators identified as conservative to some degree, while 71% classified themselves as liberal or very liberal,” professor Samuel J. Abrams wrote in a 2018 New York Times opinion piece.
With studies like these, it looks like conservatives have surrendered higher education to the radical left.
They haven’t. And there’s still hope for a comeback.
When a handful of radical leftists attempted to disrupt conservative Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s talk at the University of Minnesota’s Northrop auditorium on Monday, they were unceremoniously shut down, according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
It might not seem like much in a world where college radicals are cheering on Hamas and blaming Israel for the unspeakable atrocities in the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks, but it is telling. Not all battles against evil can take center stage.
Before Barrett even showed up to campus, almost 700 students had “signed a petition demanding the U rescind her invitation,” according to CBS News. A group of angry students mounted a protest outside the auditorium during the event.
Why all the pushback? Barrett had been invited to the University of Minnesota’s law school to take part in the Robert A. Stein lecture series.
It’s not like she was the first Supreme Court justice to visit the school. Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, John Roberts and Antonin Scalia had talked on the campus before Barrett ever showed up, according to CBS News.
Barrett, speaking in a packed auditorium, talked about her time on the Supreme Court along with the background that got her there. Big deal, right?
That’s when a group of about 10 protesters inside the auditorium began chanting, “Not the court, not the state, the people must decide their fate,” according to Minnesota’s Alpha News. The interruption didn’t last long.
The radial leftist disruptors — they weren’t really protesting but bent on making a scene — had been warned repeatedly from the podium by William McGeveran, interim dean of the law school, to cool it, but they kept right on chanting their radical demands until they were escorted out by police.
McGeveran had given a general warning before the event that “disruptions would not be tolerated,” according to Alpha News. He meant it.
The radicals, still bent on making a scene, held cloth signs reading “Abort the court,” “Defend affirmative action” and “Abortion is a human right.” When the police escorted them outside the auditorium, the radicals were greeted with cheers from fellow disruptors who were unable to get inside the building.
Alpha reporter Hayley Feland posted a video clip outside the auditorium showing students chanting, “We’re here to shut this s*** down.”
The radicals failed to shut the event down. Good.
They managed to get some media attention, but these days that kind of exposure might be doing them more harm than good. The disruptors talked a big game and failed to deliver. That makes them look impotent to their emotionally disturbed admirers.
I’ve never understood if the radical leftists who have all but taken over college campuses are anarchists, communists, fascists or some other kind of neo-Marxist totalitarians. Is there such a thing as an anarchist-totalitarian? The left is a bomb of contradictions waiting to go off.
I don’t think they know what they are or what they stand for. Their goal is to disrupt. That’s it. Their goal is the chink in their armor.
People — even some Democrats — are getting sick of the radicals’ nonsense. We have bigger problems than placating organized mobs of left-wing extremists who don’t know who they are or what they want beyond disrupting Western norms.
The Barrett incident won’t go down in the annals of American history as a turning point in the culture wars. However, the fact that it took place on a college campus is reason to celebrate.
Minnesota, after all, isn’t known as a conservative stronghold. The University of Minnesota, in fact, is a leftist stronghold — albeit one where the radicals might just be losing their grip.
What if you woke up one morning and half of the people you count on had just vanished overnight?
That happened to me recently. I got up, came to work here at The Western Journal, and when I got to my office, literally half of our readers had vanished. They were just gone. We had been nuked by Facebook, and it had happened almost instantly.
But it was even worse. Facebook hit us at the same time 90 percent of advertisers had essentially boycotted us. “Brutal” is a word I’ve used a lot lately.
The fight for the truth is brutal. The fight for America’s soul is brutal. What the government is doing to Jan. 6 detainees is brutal. What surgeons are doing to confused children is brutal.
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Sincerely,
Josh Manning
Deputy Managing Editor
The Western Journal
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