Awakening the Snoring Conservative Dragon. Part Four

Victor Davis Hanson

What can we do to resist Woke? Here are steps 7-10.

7. Continue demanding changes at the university—the incubator of the entire woke revolution. The point is not to harm but to save America’s once premier institution. Conservatives should insist on a program to save higher education to ensure our national preeminence. So:

A. Tax endowment income, given the universities are not just partisan but hyper-partisan and activist. Knowing their enormous income is not tax-free might sober up presidents to eliminate the costly commissars of the DEI industry that only audit and monitor but never teach, create, or advance research.

B. Get the government out of the $2-trillion student loan racket. By the government backing these enormous loans, students more likely default, universities more likely jack up their annual costs above the rate of inflation, and school years bloat from four years to six to eight, as teen-agers become twenty- and thirty-something drifters, with 3 units here, 6 there, going into fatal debt for a major that is often pushed down their throats but ultimately worthless. Again, financial sobriety and reality would check most of the current commissar excess.

C. Cut off all federal funds to universities that will not ensure Bill of Rights protections to their faculty and students. If speakers are shouted down and attacked, or if students are not provided due process when accused of thought crimes or sexual harassment, then universities should simply self-fund and not count on the taxpayers to subsidize their unconstitutional excesses. Why do universities customarily get away with violating the 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights acts by systematically segregating safe spaces, dorms, and graduation ceremonies on the basis of race?

D. Eliminate tenure and replace it with 5-year contracts that spell out required teaching performance, scholarship, and university service. Such requirements might curb politicking and put faculty back into the classroom and library.

E. Make the teaching credential optional with a MA or MS, one-year graduate program equally qualifying for K-12 instruction. The Schools of Education are the source of much of the woke plague that has descended upon our schools. Someone can learn how to teach in a semester, someone taught how to teach to get a credential often has no knowledge of anything to teach.

8. Start shunning, ignoring, and boycotting corporations that hate traditional America. What was strange about Disney was 1) its brands are supposedly reflective of traditional family values, 2) yet its PR and activism is anti-traditional family, and 3) it doubles down with contempt against anyone who brings these paradoxes to its attention.

9. Work to pass right-to-work legislation in as many states as possible. When teachers and government workers are given the opportunity not to have their dues automatically deducted, they usually opt out. And when they opt out, these hard left unions are deprived of the cash to alter America in their progressive image.

10. Strip security clearances from retired intelligence officers who go on televisions as analysts and are paid for their “inside insight.” Work for systemic changes, or again what the Left calls processes. So seek to move the FBI out of Washington to the Midwest and break up its divisions and parcel them out to various cabinencies. Pass legislation that adds severe penalties for any federal high-ranking official, especially in the CIA, FBI, Pentagon, or DOJ, who lies under oath to a federal investigator or Congress. The reason why a Brennan, Clapper, Comey, Fauci, Garland, or Strzok lied so readily to Congress, is that they assumed, quite rightly, that such false testimony is a joke.

And it is.