I had to read American literature in both high school and college. I read Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, Jack London, Maya Angelou, Herman Melville, John Knowles, J.D. Salinger, and many other famous American writers. Some I liked; some I didn’t like. What I invariably hated was how English teachers approached them, picking them apart to the point of inanity (and, in my day, always with an eye to sexual symbolism). However, none of my teachers used those books to advance Marxism. At Harvard, though, things have changed, with the American novel being used as a platform for destroying America and her values.

Those of us who have been paying attention (as I have since my days at Berkeley in the early 1980s) know that academia has been home to leftism for a very long time. Mostly, though, it was subtle, and ordinary Americans viewed it as fringe, irrelevant stuff that students would abandon when they hit the real world.

We normal kept saying that as we read about snowflakes and their trigger warnings. We said it as the snowflakery morphed into the racial madness of DEI and CRT. We said it when gender madness overtook racial madness. And some people have been trying to say it (“It’s a few bad actors.” “It’s outside actors.”) regarding the antisemitism that’s now the norm on American college campuses.

And mind you, this is pure antisemitism. On the UC Davis campus, which used to be among the more sensible campuses in the University of California system, an elderly Jewish (not an Israeli, but a Jewish) professor was blocked from the campus:

Masked activists block Jewish Professor from entering the UC Davis campus where he works.

pic.twitter.com/pdq4CdyXCc

— Oli London (@OliLondonTV) May 15, 2024

This is not going away, and it’s not going away because what underlies all these ugly campus movements (hypersensitivity, racial grievances, gender insanity, antisemitism) is one unifying thing: Marxism.

Moreover, the subtly of my youth in academia has given way to blatant indoctrination. You can see that in this message from a Harvard Teaching Fellow within the English Department:

Do you want to understand the depth of the rot? Here is a course eval. sheet from a Harvard Teaching Fellow on American Novels. Read the yellow: pic.twitter.com/H4uy00M9v1

— David Wolpe (@RabbiWolpe) May 14, 2024

Here is the meat from that cheery note about what the teaching fellow hoped students would take away from their readings (and God alone knows what they were reading) (emphasis mine):

You will have noticed that we spent much of our time in lecture and discussion section connecting American novels and short stories to much broader questions: about American culture and history; about intellectual histories and philosophical movements that inform these novels; about American selfhood, sensibility, free spirits, artistry, and self-making. While our formal study this semester has ended, debates about the American self, culture, and freedoms are ongoing and unfolding in a lively way right here on Harvard's campus. Concerted efforts to divest these united states from imperial and colonial projects around the world--and thereby to engender freedom, self-determination, and liberation for more of earth's inhabitants-are being foregrounded by the Harvard students, faculty, and staff who are calling for the university to disentangle itself from weapons manufacturers and settler-colonial states that use indiscriminate violence against civilians. If you haven't yet visited the encampment in Harvard Yar which regularly hosts teach-ins and opportunities for ongoing study that directly or indirectly cut to the core of American culture and freedom, I highly recommend stopping by to continue learning and thinking about many of the questions with which we have grappled this semester.

This is not English literature. Indeed, it is barely English. This is preaching the Marxist revolution using the gibberish cant of academia.

I’d like to say something profound, meaningful, and hopeful at this point but I can’t because there’s nothing to say. Our once-premier institutions are now utterly corrupt. The U.S. is facing an existential ideological war. The normal people either win or they lose.

I do suggest, though, that you vote a straight Republican ticket in November, and I say that knowing that many Congressional Republicans are RINO, Uniparty members. I also know that many conservatives viscerally dislike Donald Trump. However, a Trump-led government with a Republican Congress, even a weak one, is better than a government led entirely by Democrats. At the very least, it will give us a little breathing space to try again to right the American ship of state.

Image (edited) from drobotdean.