Fifty years ago, college campuses were a bastion of honest, intellectual discourse. After hearing and testing a variety of viewpoints, students could freely form their own opinions about the world.
Unfortunately, independent thinking and fair debate at many, if not most, American colleges are things of the past. From the moment eager freshmen enroll in their first classes, they’re subjected to distorted, small-minded, and left-leaning viewpoints of the country their forefathers fought so bravely to establish. This practice is contributing to the striking decay of patriotism from coast to coast.
It’s gone so far that even reciting the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag of the United States is abhorrent to today’s college students. But, is their vehemence so strong that they hate America more than the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, ISIS?
A recent campus experiment conducted by filmmaker Ami Horowitz sheds light on this unbelievable assertion. While visiting the notoriously liberal University of California, Berkley, campus, Horowitz, known for his liberal-on-the-street tests, stood in multiple well-traveled areas. While standing, the filmmaker waved a huge American flag and praised the United States as students and others walked by.
According to The Blaze, Horowitz said to passersby, “Greatest country in the world, right?” As a college student, I certainly wouldn’t have had any difficulties answering this question in the affirmative. However, some liberal student respondents voiced bitter opinions including, “The opposite. The complete opposite,” “The one imperial power in the world,” “Uh, Canada’s pretty great,” “Your flag sucks, fool,” and “God is not proud of us.” Some students aimed obscenities at Horowitz and the free country they’re blessed to call home.
After gathering a substantial number of angry reactions, Horowitz changed stances and waved the ISIS flag while spouting terrorist talking points to those who passed by. For instance, he proclaimed “The black flag of ISIS will stand over the White House” and “I denounce Western imperialism.”
As I would imagine, students’ responses to the ISIS flag were decidedly different than students’ reactions to the American flag. However, to my utter amazement, the students in the experiment responded more positively towards the ISIS flag, which represents a group of proud murderers, rapists, pillagers, and misogynists. Horowitz was cheered on by a couple of passersby who stated, “Good for you, man. Good for you,” and “I love that you’re saying that.” The filmmaker doggedly waved the ISIS flag for several hours while spewing anti-American rhetoric. During this time, only one individual reacted negatively.
Three years ago, Horowitz performed a similar experiment at Berkley’s unabashedly liberal campus. In this test, the filmmaker first waved an ISIS flag. He then displayed an Israeli flag. Sadly, the results were similar. Seeing the ISIS flag garnered little reaction from the students. When Horowitz switched to waving the Israeli flag, angry young liberals assaulted him with insults about the Jewish state. They referred to it as being guilty of genocide.
I would like to believe the cavalier attitude about ISIS and loathing of America displayed by the Berkley students is an isolated incident. Unfortunately, it’s more mainstream than patriotic conservative Americans might imagine. In an April, 2017 interview with the hosts of “Fox & Friends,” Cabot Phillips, a contributor at CampusReform.org, discussed an interesting survey conducted by the organization. The survey questioned Harvard students to see if President Trump was viewed as a bigger threat to Americans than ISIS.
During the interview, Phillips said, “We always see students that are saying everything threatens them in the world and they are always being taught by the media the sensationalist idea that everything Donald Trump does must be the end of the world.” An alarming number of students viewed Trump as enemy number one instead of murderous, villainous ISIS. One student ignorantly stated, “I think more of [Trump’s] policies mainly because I think terrorism really isn’t that big of a deal.”
The World Trade Center terrorist attacks killed thousands of people a mere 16 years ago. Over the past year alone, ISIS has carried out numerous attacks killing scores of innocent people. I find it mind-boggling that some college students don’t even acknowledge the existence, much less the real threat, of terrorism in the world today.
So, why are college students in the United States becoming exceedingly more hostile to their own country? A January, 2017 report by the National Association of Scholars, NAS, titled Making Citizens: How American Universities Teach Civics offers a startling explanation. The report outlines a disturbing new movement in higher education in the United States that aims to transform the traditional teaching of civics. The new movement, referred to as “New Civics” by the NAS, reclassifies civics as progressive political activism.
New Civics advocates seek to turn unassuming college students into enthusiastic supporters of the left’s dream of completely transforming America. Led by a combination of federal bureaucrats, non-profit organizations, and administrators and professors at college campuses, New Civics goals include massively redistributing wealth, cultivating identity group grievances, ending the free market, expanding government programs, replacing American Constitutional law with international norms, rewriting common history, and changing long-held ideals.
New Civics supplants traditional liberal arts education with vocational training for community activists. Proponents of this dangerous movement hope to take over the entire college. They want to make civic engagement components of every college course, extra-curricular activity, and tenure decision.
In its report, the NAS proposes 10 recommendations to change civics education around the country. Ideas include redefining civic ideals in non-progressive terms, freezing or ending all federal and state funding for civic engagement and service-learning, and mandating a class in traditional American civics as a graduation requirement at every college and university that benefits from public funding.
In addition to supporting the NAS recommendations, I feel strongly that concerned, conservative parents should start taking a stand. If enough parents quit sending their kids to left-leaning campuses bent on fundamentally changing America and fueling hatred against it, they would have to either end their vile practices or shut their doors.
