Category Archives: Academia

The Collapse of The Enlightenment, by Paul Rosenberg

The Enlightenment propelled much of what we call civilization. From Paul Rosenberg at freemansperspective.com:

We are watching the Enlightenment collapse before us in real time. I’ll be fairly brief in my explanation of why this is so and how it came about, but it strikes me as something we should understand.

Bear in mind that what remains of the Enlightenment is collapsing for structural reasons. I haven’t formed this discourse around political or academic theories, I’m basing it on facts and direct observations. Obviously I’m simplifying (one can’t write history any other way), but minus the inevitable exceptions and complications, this is what happened and what is happening.

How The Enlightenment Gained A Structure

The Enlightenment began with a collection of outsiders studying science. They had little backing and few credentials. In fact, the motto of the first group (that became The Royal Society) was Nullius in verba: “Take nobody’s word for it.” There was a lot to like in the early Enlightenment, and it led to a long string of crucial discoveries.

About halfway through its run, however, at about 1750 AD, the Enlightenment took a dark turn. Rather than working to discover what was right, it began to fixate on what was wrong. That is, the leading voices of the Enlightenment left off building and moved into tearing things down.

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Will universities ever admit they were wrong about COVID policy? by Matthew G. Andersson

Ego, conformity, and cover your ass are powerful forces in the academy. From Matthew G. Andersson at americanthinker.com:

Former White House adviser Dr. Scott Atlas, the Robert Wesson Senior Fellow in health policy at Stanford University’s Hoover Institute, wrote an excellent essay recently in the Wall Street Journal.  In it, he raises a vital question for all students, parents, faculty, and the broader public, as to how our nation’s university system became, along with major media, the most aggressive proponent and distributor of medical ideology and biosecurity policy.  University behavior continues to be directed by the CDC and WHO, and it appears that university administration will continue its commitment to a consensus posture toward the COVID phenomenon, until another institution that it considers authoritative tells it otherwise.  That is not likely to happen.

Academia will never account for its misguided COVID policies, and it will never back out of its commitment to consensus explanations or opportunities.  Indeed, these people will help accelerate the entire COVID complex.  COVID is a new social engineering program, and universities will make biosecurity, including molecular engineering and tracking technology, into a permanent research activity that is worth billions per year in funding and commercialization.  The link connecting business, government, and higher education has never been stronger, while China-style social credit scoring, based in part on medical and ideological compliance, is considered by the current White House administration a necessary part of the political agenda.

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Are Progressive “Experts” Fallible? Yes, But Don’t Tell Them That, by Claudio Grass

One of the unfortunate side effects of capitalism’s prodigious creation of wealth is the flow of money into academia, think tanks, media, and bureaucracies that in turn leads to the formation of an “expert” class. From Claudio Grass at mises.org:

It can be argued that the world has reached the sorry state it’s in today largely because academics, politicians, “distinguished experts,” and “recognized authorities” did not have the humility to admit their own mistakes or to at least recognize the limits of their knowledge. Of course, this is far from a new affliction in societies and political systems. Hubris was among the most terrible sins that the ancient Greeks warned against, and there have been too many narcissists in positions of power to count since the emergence of the first organized societies. People who believe they know best, not just for themselves, but everyone else too, are naturally attracted to roles that would allow them to impose their will, their morality, and their values on their neighbors.

However, one also can argue that the problem is much more prevalent today than at any other time in our history. The modern news landscape, both mainstream and social media, the supercharged propaganda machines of all developed nations, and our public education system, ensure that dangerous figures will hardly be challenged by anyone once presented to the public as de facto, “recognized,” and “widely accepted” authorities. This is also true of politicians, but things are infinitely more perilous when it comes to science. The average citizen can more easily question a political stance directly, whereas it can be impossible to judge the merits of a scientific one without detailed and specific knowledge.

Therefore, it is much easier to “sell” any academic, from professors to junior researchers, as an “authority,” one that must be obeyed and never questioned. They can freely give us all advice on how to live our lives, and they can even dictate policy, despite the fact that usually that kind of thing tends to have side effects in areas they have absolutely no clue about. Once placed on their pedestals, they become “anointed.” They don’t even have to share their qualifications, their accomplishments, or any testimonies from their peers.

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Economic collapse = societal collapse. It’s deliberate so that we can have “order out of chaos”, as in New World Order, also known as the tyranny of the ruling sociopaths. By Klark Barnes

Economic collapse will have far reaching ramifications. From Klark Barnes at earlking56.family.blog:

Other than the obvious consequences, what might we expect from a partial economic collapse? A total collapse of the economy would throw the nation into utter chaos. But what if we endure an economic depression, or a severe and long-lasting downturn? I think that some of the effects are not so obvious.

1. The college and university system will collapse

As I explained in this previous post, the system of higher education is a house of cards. The cost of getting a college degree has risen sharply and steadily, while real income has remained relatively flat. The price rise is due to the easy availability of grants and loans for education. But with so many persons getting a college degree, its value in the marketplace has plummeted. Many college grads are out of work, or they are working in a job that does not require a degree. Eventually, this practice of paying more and more, for something that is worth less and less, will collapse the system. Colleges and universities will not have enough paying students, and professors will not agree to a drastic pay cut. Overhead expenses are far too high.

All that is needed is an economic collapse, or partial collapse, to topple this house of cards. Many universities and colleges will be forced by economics to shut down.

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A New Dawn: The End of Legal Discrimination? By Ann Coulter

Are we coming to the end of soft quotas and discrimination in employment and academic admissions? From Ann Coulter at takimag.com:

A New Dawn: The End of Legal Discrimination?

For more than 50 years, our country has been engaged in systemic discrimination against the nation’s most despised racial group, whites. Recently, the Supreme Court heard cases challenging legal race discrimination in a pair of lawsuits brought against Harvard and the University of North Carolina for their “affirmative action” policies.

Despite the oft-repeated claim that affirmative action “hurts black people the most,” for the past half-century, it’s whites who’ve been bringing lawsuit after lawsuit for being rejected — solely because of their race — from universities (not to mention jobs, promotions, government contracts, scholarships, executive suites, homecoming queens, etc.).

In response, the Supreme Court announced this fundamental principal of constitutional law: Could you guys try hiding what you’re doing a little better?

That’s why the current cases have the legal world abuzz. Could this finally be the end of rank prejudice masquerading as virtue? This time, you see, the plaintiffs are Asian.

The switch from white to Asian has important legal implications. To be sure, with their high SAT scores and low crime rates, Asians are “white adjacent” and therefore also kinda hated. But at least they’re not white.

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Will the Supreme Court End Affirmative Action? by Peter Van Buren

When the first affirmative action laws came out and were blessed by the courts, we were told they were a temporary measure. The Bakke decision was in 1978, 44 years ago. There are no temporary government programs. From Peter Van Buren at theamericanconservative.com:

If you thought the Supreme Court threw up some dust overturning Roe v. Wade, watch this current term as the Court considers overturning Grutter v. Bollinger and decides whether “race-conscious” admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina are lawful.

The two cases the Court might use to overturn Grutter, Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina, pose three questions. First, can race be a factor in admissions? Second, has Harvard violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by penalizing Asian-American applicants? And third, quoting the Court, can a university “reject a race-neutral alternative because it would change the composition of the student body, without proving that the alternative would cause a dramatic sacrifice in academic quality or the educational benefits of overall student-body diversity?”

The essential question, then, is this: can race continue to be a factor in university admissions?

In 2003, the Court in Grutter upheld affirmative action in academic admissions, saying race can indeed be considered in admissions decisions alongside things like tests and grades. After being denied admission to University of Michigan Law School, white student Barbara Grutter sued the school, alleging it discriminated against her on the basis of race in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s right to equal protection, as well as Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. She claimed, in the words of the Court, that she was rejected because the law school “used race as a ‘predominant’ factor, giving applicants belonging to certain minority groups a significantly greater chance of admission than students with similar credentials” from disfavored racial groups such as whites and Asians.

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The Absurdly Cruel and Unusual Punishment of College Vaccine Mandates, by Lucia Sinatra

Subject people in the prime of their lives, for whom Covid is a minor risk, to all the known and still to emerge dangers of Covid vaccines and bivalent boosters or they can’t attend the college to which they’ve earned admission and to which they’ve paid their tuition. It’s a nice introduction to the now galloping totalitarianism that’s strangling our country. From Lucia Sinatra at nocollegemandates.substack.com:

Some colleges have recently announced they will require students to get the new COVID-19 bivalent booster shot. Harvard University and Smith College are both requiring students to take the bivalent booster but not faculty and staff. Tufts is mandating the bivalent booster for everyone, and for the first time ever, mandating the flu vaccine for students only. Some University of California (UC) college websites have been updated to state that the UC vaccine policy requires all staff and students to get the bivalent vaccine but, “Compliance with the bivalent booster requirement does not yet affect employment status, access to facilities or access to services at UC Davis.” Whitman College is requiring the bivalent booster for everyone, and Wake Forest has announced it will require the bivalent booster “when it becomes available”.  For thousands of college students, this means they will be required to get a second booster dose that was approved without any human clinical trials to establish the safety and efficacy of the new formula and that was rushed through development “when we are at practically historic lows for deaths and ICU stays due to COVID.” On what basis are they requiring this young adult population to get a 2nd booster?  It feels like déjà vu, but not the good kind.

In April 2021, the director of the CDC, Rachelle Walensky, declared that because of the new vaccine, the end of the pandemic was near. As a result, over 1,000 colleges mandated the primary series vaccines. By summer of 2021, 325 of those colleges announced that students would be required to get a booster vaccine prior to returning for the start of the 2021/2022 academic year. By mid-summer, however, colleges knew that the vaccines do not prevent infection from COVID-19 nor reduce community spread. Colleges knew that young adults are at a near zero risk of severe illness and death from the virus. Yet many colleges mandated boosters anyway with the reasoning (if you want to give them that much credit) that continued vaccination was, wait for it . . . the best way to “protect our community”. There was never any data to support the claim that vaccines and boosters protect the community and there still isn’t. If you want to take a vaccine to protect yourself based on a personal risk/benefit analysis than by all means get as many as you’d like. To force vaccines on an overwhelmingly healthy young adult population in neither justified nor safe. College students were stripped of informed consent when mandates were imposed. Informed consent should never be removed except when facing the most dire of health threats, and COVID-19 is not one of them.

On August 11, 2022, the CDC updated its COVID-19 guidance. Most notable is that the CDC stated that people with previous infection have immunity from severe infection. Colleges that maintain “blanket mandates ignore critical data, such as the benefit of prior infection and the data on adverse events” per a study authored by academics from the Universities of Washington, Oxford, Toronto, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, UCSF and others. The study estimates that “per Covid-19 hospitalization prevented in previously uninfected young adults, we anticipate 18 to 98 serious adverse events, including 1.7 to 3.0 booster-associated myocarditis cases in males,” and concludes “university Covid-19 vaccine mandates are likely to cause net expected harms to young healthy adults”.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock or you are so brainwashed by the vaccine propaganda, everyone knows that the vaccine manufacturers didn’t have time and the FDA didn’t require them to conduct human clinical trials. This new and novel bivalent booster vaccine was tested on 8 mice, expeditiously approved and is now being forced upon thousands of college students to remain matriculated at the college in which they are enrolled and for which they have paid.

Are these new boosters safe? We have no idea. Are they additive to the 95% population-wide immunity? Highly unlikely. There are many choice words to characterize the bivalent booster mandates, but for now, we’ll call them reckless, cruel and wildly unjustified.

Several weeks ago, No College Mandates launched our fifth letter campaign to colleges urging them to follow updated CDC guidelines that now recognize natural immunity. To date, this letter has been sent to nearly 200 colleges and more are on the way. The letter was signed by two freedom fighting organizations: No Colleges Mandates and Health Freedom Fund and five law firms: Barnes Law, LLP, Facts, Law, Truth, Justice, Health Freedom Counsel, The Mendenhall Law Group and The Mermigis Law Group, P.C. It urges colleges to immediately drop all vaccine and booster mandates or potentially expose themselves to significant legal liability.

This is how you can help. Email your college, your kid’s colleges, your grandchildren’s colleges and any other college that you support, and tell them you’ll never donate another penny, and you will only reconsider if they drop all present and future COVID-19 vaccine mandates. I did, and if we could only get some momentum around it, colleges might just start to pay attention.

Lucia Sinatra

Co-founder, No College Mandates

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“Ethically Unjustifiable” – Scientists from Harvard & Johns Hopkins Found Covid-19 Vaccines 98 Times Worse Than the Virus, by Jim Hoft

Of course, Harvard and Johns Hopkins are notoriously antivaxx institutions. From Jim Hoft at 2ndsmartestguyintheworld.substack.com:

The Truth is coming out daily. The entire PSYOP-19 narrative is imploding. This makes the enemy increasingly more desperate and as such more dangerous heading into the PSYOP-22 cold and flu season.

A new pre-print study by nine health experts from major universities showed that the COVID-19 vaccines are 98 times worse than the virus, and mandatory booster vaccination in college is “ethically unjustifiable,” as reported by Epoch Times.

The study was posted on The Social Science Research Network (SSRN) in September, titled, “COVID-19 Vaccine Boosters for Young Adults: A Risk-Benefit Assessment and Five Ethical Arguments against Mandates at Universities.

It was conducted by nine top scientists from the University of Washington, University of Oxford, University of Toronto, Harvard University – Harvard Medical School, University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), Johns Hopkins University – Department of Surgery, and others.

Using CDC and sponsor-reported adverse event data, researchers conclude that booster regulations may result in more harm than good.

According to the study, for every one COVID hospitalization prevented in previously uninfected young adults, “18 to 98 actual serious adverse events” have been caused.

“Per COVID-19 hospitalization prevented in previously uninfected young adults, we anticipate 18 to 98 serious adverse events, including 1.7 to 3.0 booster-associated myocarditis cases in males, and 1,373 to 3,234 cases of grade ≥3 reactogenicity which interferes with daily activities,” the study stated.

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Fauci Goes to Princeton, by Mark Oshinskie

Admittance to Princeton is neither a certification of intelligence or integrity. From Mark Oshinskie at brownstone.org:

Last month, I went to Princeton to protest the University’s “Class Day” speaker, Tony Fauci. It astounded me that students would invite someone who stole over two years of their college experiences and young lives. By selecting Fauci, Princeton students showed that they’re celebrity worshipers, not critical thinkers.

The students certainly didn’t vet Fauci by reading RFK Jr.’s The Real Anthony Fauci, which reveals how corrupt, hostile and destructive this Napoleonic tyrant is. The Princeton grads I know are all Groupthinkers. Most tend not to speak well in English, much less in a second language. Like Fauci, they’re very overrated.

I was among a dozen protesters who displayed signs as we stood on the Nassau Street sidewalk just outside the campus gates. My sign had two sides, One side said, “Vaxxes Did Not Stop the Spread.” The other side said, “Hopkins Study (February, 2022): Fauci Lied.”

Fauci recently claimed that lockdowns, masks, tests and “vaccines” had saved many lives. The Hopkins study shredded this notion and observed that Faucist “mitigation” strategies have caused tremendous, lasting harm.

Many drivers who passed us honked approvingly. Numerous strangers approached and expressed agreement with us or passed by with thumbs up. Some said they bought the fear for a month until they began to change their minds. I’ve heard that often, and never understood it. The powergrab was obvious from Day 1. Why lock down healthy people for the first time in human history when only a tiny fraction of some very old, very sick people had—at least purportedly—died from this infection?

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Doug Casey on Why Woke Corporations Will Go Broke

Business people who decide there are more important things for their company than making money eventually stop making money. From Doug Casey at internationalman.com:

Woke

International Man: There seems to be a concerted effort to blur the lines around gender. For instance, it’s now common for schools to introduce bizarre gender theories to prepubescent children.

What is going on here?

Doug Casey: The reports are so bizarre and crazy that you’d think that they were made up, but apparently, they’re not.

Different societies throughout history have had different standards of morality and attitudes towards bringing up children and sexual morals. But at this point, in the West, the nuclear family itself, and everything that’s been considered traditional and normal, is under active attack. How else to explain Mayor Pete, the Secretary of Transportation, playing with his husband, or whatever he or she is? Or the bizarre tranny, Rachel Levine, sporting some kind of an admiral’s uniform? Or the new national Press Secretary, whose main qualification is that she’s a strident black lesbian?

However, this type of thing often happens when a society is heading towards collapse. The dissipated practices of Roman emperors like Caligula, Nero, Commodus, Caracalla, Elagabalus, and others gradually filtered down into the common people, and the Dark Ages followed. More recently, look at the things that went on in Germany after WW1, during the Weimar Republic. Sexual debauchery and moral (as well as economic) degeneracy ruled. These things destabilized society, evidenced by street fights and riots between the Nazis and the Communists. It all resembles what’s brewing in the US between the Red people and the Blue people. History rhymes.

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