Welp. They got me. My wife told me, don’t sign up for the Word on Fire trial just to rag on them. Free’s never free. You’ll get signed up for all sorts of horseshit. Reader, I am now a proud member of Hillsdale College’s mailing list. And my opinion has been solicited on the most serious of official business: a National Opinion Survey on the Marxist Hijacking of American Education. Shudder.
Of course I filled it out, and did my best to enlist my brain in the great patriotic struggle—kampf, if you will. After all, Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn—student of the master himself, Harry Jaffa!—sent a lengthy introductory lecture for my education. Who is my enemy? What is my grievance? To whom do I owe my loyalty?
Dear Friend of Liberty—that’s me!
You’re a concerned American who keeps up with current events. Exactly. I am concerned, and deeply informed. Tell me more! That means you know something is seriously wrong in our nation’s schools. I’ll say! I’m sitting in the woods instead of professing at some storied institution.
You know that a fierce ideological battle is raging in classrooms all across the country, and our children are at risk. That I do know!
This is no accident. Of course not. Who’s to blame?
The far-Left, driven by a Marxist vision of a radically transformed society, has strategically targeted education. Those ungrateful bastards! After all America gave them. They probably tried to get me!
The takeover of our schools is a crucial objective in the campaign to erase the principles that form the foundation of American freedom and prosperity. These radicals have successfully infiltrated our educational system and infected it with destructive and anti-American ideologies. Vermin! If you don’t like America, leave! I’ll show you the door!
Schools across America indoctrinate their students with these ideologies, including critical race theory, socialism, and transgenderism—all of which undermine your liberty. Leave. My. Liberty. Alone. You. Rat. Bastards!
Arnn’s pamphlet goes on and on, so I jumped ahead to the survey. That too proved . . . excessive. So here are just the prime cuts.
1. Critical race theory has a divisive effect in our schools, increasing race consciousness and racial division in the name of “anti-racism.”
“Strongly Agree” box vigorously checked. Scrawled “Our Constition is COLORBLIND!!!” in the margin.
2. Do you think using federal or state tax dollars to teach critical race theory in American schools is wrong?
Hard “No.” “Public education belongs to the States {quadruple underline}.”
4. Do you believe schools in [insert State here] should defend the free and open exchange of ideas, including ideas opposed to far-Left ideas like socialism?
Big red X over “No.” Violently circled “open exchange of ideas” and scribbled “I don’t want my kids exposed to Leftist filth.”
6. Do you think schools should be allowed to refer students for gender transition treatment without their parents’ knowledge?
This one had me unsure. But I decided on “Yes” and wrote “Fix them sissy liberal boys into real American MEN!”
7. Should schools teach their students about America’s founding principles and require them to study the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution?
Ecstatic “Yes.” “Shall not be infringed!”
In 2012, Hillsdale College began producing FREE online courses, such as “Constitution 101: The Meaning and History of the Constitution,” “The Great American Story: A Land of Hope,” and “Marxism, Socialism, and Communism.” [WHAT??????] Today, more than 40 FREE online courses are available to anyone who wishes to learn, and more than 4 million Americans have enrolled in one or more.
9. To what extent do you support the production of additional FREE online courses about America’s great heritage of liberty?
“Strongly oppose.” Circled the offending “Marxism, Socialism, and Communism” and added in the margin “I don’t want my kids learning this.”
And to close out:
11. To what extent do you support the continuing distribution of FREE copies of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution to teachers and students at K–12 students nationwide?
“Strongly oppose.” Free? Hell no. “No Handouts!”
Okay. Was this the most gracious way to spend my morning? Absolutely not. Will Hillsdale staff immediately toss my survey-form and remove me from the mailing list? Probably (hopefully). But we’re all entitled to a good laugh while America descends into this proto-fascist nightmare, especially at the expense of the morons who stand to benefit from it.
Make no mistake, these people are morons. Looking back on this series, that’s my first takeaway. Maybe I’m a sucker? I just foolishly continue to believe—hope?—that the world still maintains some semblance of meritocracy to which I can aspire? That these established, well paid, happily employed, often tenured “intellects” of the right (or center) do, in fact, merit their reward. That someday my efforts will pay off instead of just winding up continually unemployed. I really did read Barron & Co.’s entire volume expecting some vigorous intellectual dialogue. But, wow, was I ever disappointed.
It was historically illiterate. From Barron ranking Calhoun among America’s “greatest statesmen,” or Worner’s assertion that Allied soldiers faced “overwhelming odds” storming the beaches of Normandy akin to Henry V’s men at Agincourt, to Petrusek’s confident declaration that Catholicism is democracy’s best friend—without once grappling with the Church’s long held opposition to it—and Krause’s conclusion that Christianity comprised the single greatest distinction between the courses of the American and French Revolutions.
It was bad Christianity. Ignore the continual exhortations to throw up our hands and “pray on it” rather than knuckle down and get to work changing the world. Are we really supposed to just accept that the Christ who taught us “blessed are the poor” would just throw up his hands like Kaczor and accept that the material legacy of enslavement—the racial wealth, education, and health gap—is just the way the world works? What might Christ think of poor, embattled Hoopes’ efforts as a young Congressional staffer to strip healthcare from the poor? Even Krause and Cooper’s dives into the Puritan roots of American democracy couldn’t be bothered to recognize that Christ’s first command—love your neighbor as yourself—provided the bedrock? They were too busy justifying Christian nationalism, too steeped in the emperor’s creed to recall that the State crucified Christ (I’m not even ready to poke dangerous antisemitism evoked by the deliberate amnesia about who really killed Christ).
Surely, I’d thought, Arnn would give me something to think about. But he didn’t boldly pick up Jaffa’s banner with a great intellectual defense of Lincoln’s equality as a conservative principle! He just blathered on about State’s Rights so that Kaczor could bitch about Federal school integration.
Throughout, Barron & Co. simply betrayed a purely aesthetic concept of the world. Everything of import vindicates them; everything contrary may be discarded. So confidently they claim Jefferson’s Declaration for Christianity. Democracy is a playground popularity contest. Celebrate the adherence to history and tradition when it reaches your preconceived morals, damn it as relativism and the road to serfdom when it doesn’t—don’t worry about actually thinking through whether equal recognition of human dignity and capacity recognizes women’s bodily autonomy. The inherent dignity of human life begins at conception only to prohibit abortion—not to prohibit wasting human lives to war, poverty, or famine; not to guarantee provision of healthcare, housing, or education to our fellow children of God. Slavery is prohibited as a theoretical matter, not a material one. Elevate the embattled Thomas Mores and Jefferson Smiths—don’t probe their principles. Limited government can do anything we want, nothing we don’t! Recall lovingly Athenian democracy—ignore the rampant slavery upholding the whole venture—and St. Augustine’s imperium—ignore its anti-democratic totalitarianism. Christian nationalism is an absurd insult when liberals use it. But the Puritans went to Church, so America is a Christian nation. Don’t think about it too hard.
This series proved exhausting. By far, the most difficult part of my criticism was organizing Barron & Co.’s word vomit into a halfway coherent manner so I didn’t feel so stupid writing it. At the end, there could be no other takeaway. These people are morons. But wading through the bullshit, over and over I found myself asking, who falls for this shit?
Scared people. That’s the real takeaway of this series. Credit the Hillsdale survey for prompting, because Arnn doesn’t hide it—battle, risk, strategically targeted, infiltrated, infected, destructive, anti-American, indoctrinate. But everything vulgar and obvious in the Hillsdale crap is right there in Word on Fire. Flipping through the magazine one last time, Barron’s “nice old bishop” routine barely conceals the terror throughout.
“Christians,” Fr. Andrie tells us, “know that the most significant battleground is not the political or legislative landscape but rather begins within the individual soul—the center of battle between the kingdom of God and that of the evil one” (143). Salvation a “battle???” As though Christ did not triumph to save all? At least there’s some consistency—all does not mean all. Yeah—I was raised in this crap. Hell is real, and populated! The Conservative “God” is an asshole who dropkicks his supposed children (made without their consent, by the way) into overwhelming circumstances beyond their control, beholden to an arbitrary and unquestionable moral code which they’ll naturally fail to live up to, and then—unless they perform precisely the correct battery of purifying rights throughout their life and up to their moment of death—damns them to eternal abandonment and punishment. Because, remember, you’d deserve it! Americans “cling to the idea that evil and crime are merely responses to flawed social conditions, whereas they are an essential part of being human . . . Evil goes all the way down” (Dr. Gary Saul Morson, Solzhenitsyn at Harvard, 99–100). God creates evil men and then punishes them for it!
Don’t try to reason your way out of this. After all, reason isn’t really a viable option if questioning God gets you eternal hellfire. So not only are racial and gender disparities simply how the world works, as Kaczor pretty clearly implies by the structure of his essay, trying to fix them is the sin of hubris! “There are certain things forbidden whatever consequences threaten . . . moral evil harms the evildoer” (46–47). Besides, not only will you face damnation for trying too hard to fix the world, you’ll probably just break this world trying! Remember, Worner tells it, “modern sophisticated democrac[ies]” (like the Weimar Republic, lol) can devolve into totalitarian and Nazi horrors at a moment’s notice (5–6). “There is no crime,” Dr. Morson warns, “that cannot be justified by ideology, principles, or the latest enlightened ideas. ‘Revolution,’ ‘social justice,’ and other magic words confer license to indulge or applaud our basest impulses” (99–100).
But none of this means you can sit still and just be content with what little you’ve got. You’re always under fire. This world is “full of hatred” (Paolelli, 34), “relativism[,] and secularism” (Interview with WoF Member Manny Marquez, 138). Remember Worner’s Jeremiad? “We’ve devolved to a point where a bill serving almost any interest or appetite (no matter how heinous) can be passed into law without dispute if there are enough votes and an abstaining veto pen” (9). Just turn on the news, Krause and Cooper say. Some liberal somewhere is yelling about the America’s Christian origins transformed into the “bogeyman” of Christian nationalism, “wielded as a partisan weapon for political gain against conservative Christians” (23–24, 74). You will be rejected and discriminated against for your beliefs (Marquez 132, 139). Christianity is the singular bulwark between the American Revolutionary virtue and the wanton French violence. “Yet the new totalitarians want us to forget exactly that” (26). The “[s]ocial justice warriors” are coming (45). So are the “pro-abortion femini[sts]” (54). Will you have the courage to die for your faith like St. Thomas More? (Angela Jendro, St. Thomas More, Lessons on Integrity & Allegiance, 18).
And when’s the last time you weren’t scared? Job could be lost at a moment’s notice. Happened to a friend. Boss’s mistakes are always your fault. Stay awake. Bills piling up. Rent/mortgage. Put on a good face for the kids. Student loans, credit card from the last car trouble. Name-brand prescription. Stay awake. Groceries getting expensive. Nine hours. Boss coming by. Forty-five minute drive. Stay awake.
Of course, neither Barron & Co. nor Hillsdale care. They didn’t ask. That survey didn’t include any write-in lines, except for your billing information. They don’t offer solutions. Your fear is leverage. Scared people make scared decisions, look for scary causes; they can be convinced of anything. Conservatives don’t care what you fear. They’re glad you are. And they’ll tell you what else to be scared of, thank you very much. Stagnant wages? Immigrants coming for your jobs. Taxes? Welfare queens and lazy immigrants. Job worries? DEI hires. Need healthcare? It’s going to immigrants and trans kids. Expensive groceries? Rampant crime. Your little cut of America is under threat. They’re coming.
For those who will suffer the consequences, reactionaries’ political program isn’t based on a coherent ideology, it’s based on fear. Republican voters are meant to be running from their most recent fright to the first strong parental figure presented to them. Much, perhaps most, of it is made up. But the underlying fears are real. Call it mercy or call it politics. I don’t care. Stop pretending they intelligibly voted for this, that the racism and sexism is innate rather than inflicted on vulnerable minds, that it’s deliberate and not just flailing, that the looming consequences are somehow self-inflicted. When Americans told us they were scared, one party told us the economy was doing just fine; the other listened and leveraged it. Barron & Co. understand at least that about democracy.
Didn’t realize Hillsdale had descended that far. Conservatism (understood as Trumpism) may seem ascendant now but when even the intellectuals on the right have to resort to pandering to fears of Marxism “infiltrating” the schools, well, the movement is spent, bankrupt. It will take awhile but ideas do matter and the Trump-Bannon right is going to collapse.