American colleges and universities pose an existential threat to our nation that hosts and so lavishly supports them. In fact, they are the single biggest threat to Western civilization, now over 2,000 years old.

If you are like most people, you probably think the previous two sentences were overly bold, hyperbolic, preposterous. Maybe even crazy. And you would be wrong. The rot emanating from institutions of higher learning in the United States is more dangerous even than the coronavirus. The virus of wokeism eats away its hosts’ mental capacity and renders them ignorant, bitter, hostile, unstable, overly emotional and intellectually impotent. COVID-19 will eventually disappear, but the brain damage inflicted by today’s universities likely will not. Neither mask mandates nor social distancing can protect us from the ravages loosed on us by modern American academia. Lockdowns don’t work, either. All of these may, in fact, be symptoms of the disease they have wrought.

This is unspeakably sad, as these self-same institutions once existed in large part to challenge and enlighten students and introduce them to the great works of Western civilization and the foundational principles of American society and Judeo-Christian ethics. They taught students how best to think, not what to think. Like a free and impartial press, these institutions were once beneficial-- indeed critical-- to the health of a free democratic republic. We have neither now.

Today’s colleges and universities serve only to further the goals of their elitist benefactors by indoctrinating their charges into a ubiquitous and homogenous Marxist mindset, one at loggerheads with the notion of a free, democratic republic based on the rule of law and governed by, of, and for the people.

Today’s colleges and universities give lip service to “tolerance,” fawn over “diversity,” and purport to be open and welcoming to all. Nothing could be further from the truth. Conservatives are shunned, canceled, threatened, fired, or assaulted as the case may be. Professors and students openly rejoice in the physical misfortune -- or even death -- of those who do not share their radical political agenda. “Activists” demand the removal of statues of historic figures… if they haven’t already defaced and toppled them. Even as they savage the past, colleges are repeating it by increasingly racially segregating their students and initiating separate, racially-based departments, dorms, and graduation ceremonies.

Colleges are degrading or eliminating their grading and behavioral standards in an effort to “help” minorities. How patrician and racist is that? They argue that absolutely everything is racist, unaware that by doing so they have refuted their own claim. Many are in favor of slavery reparations, or the massive transfer of wealth from those who never owned slaves to those who never were slaves. They are pushing to defund the police. And eliminate political opposition.

Big Academia is also wildly infatuated with the proposition that there are an infinite number of genders, that sexuality is a “construct” on a “spectrum,” and that drag queens are sacrosanct, the backbone of our civilization, so the avoidance of one or more is akin to a criminal act.

Universities have come to believe sexuality is Black and white, too, insofar as it is somehow different for each race, and therefore also requires separate classes, teachers and venues. Their fervent embrace of transgender theory has led at least one to teach that Jesus was “non-binary.”

Telling the truth about almost anything is now strictly verboten on campuses across the fruited plain. Universities have threatened to expel students for saying “a woman is a woman” and “a man is a man.”

Colleges aid and abet students in their attempt to repeal truth and cancel history. Which has led to some students’ avowed desire to repeal the Constitution. And professors to state that free speech is “racist.”

Universities haven’t just been given a free ride, they have been lavishly, almost obscenely, funded in recent years. Some have endowments making them wealthier than many nations. Grants, loans and debt forgiveness have allowed them to rapidly raise their tuition rates to obscene levels as well, even as they have the gall to denounce capitalism, business, and the “greedy rich.”

It is time for these indoctrination centers to be defundedc-- and deprived of the free ride and unearned esteem they have been granted for the past several decades — if we Americans are to once again live up to the ideals that made us great.

But a threat to the nation? Really?

What would you call an institution that rewrites history, denigrates and attempts to destabilize the country it is supposed to serve, seeks to resegregate society, and wishes to erase all distinctions between men and women?

Graphic credit: Saeful Muslim, ID, via The Noun Project CC BY-3.0