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Why do state schools bankroll people who despise the state?
Imagine an Iranian warship minding its own business in the Indian Ocean, when, out of nowhere, a mean and abusive American submarine appears and starts launching torpedoes for no reason except sheer cruelty. At least, that’s how one professor I recently encountered retold the story. In his telling, the United States isn’t merely mistaken or imprudent. It’s the villain in a cartoon morality play, cast forever as the bully.Others insist that President Trump’s actions toward Iran can only be explained by domestic political distraction — specifically, an alleged effort to divert attention from the Epstein files. Their reasoning runs like this: Trump once speculated that Barack Obama might attack Iran for political reasons. Therefore — through a piece of logic that would embarrass a first-year philosophy student — Trump must now be doing precisely that himself.We believe — correctly — that free speech requires tolerating ideas that are foolish, offensive, or absurd. But the First Amendment does not require taxpayers to finance those ideas.The pattern keeps repeating. In January, a handful of progressive philosophers of religion flooded social media to denounce ICE based on fake reports. American Christians, they declared, must allow unrestricted immigration as a requirement of loving their neighbor. Point out that the passages they cite presuppose conversion to the faith, and the conversation pivots quickly from political lecturing to hostility toward Christian scripture itself.My own social media was full of posts by progressive philosophers repeating Democrat talking points. One notable example is philosopher Eleonore Stump, who reposted fake stories about Liam Ramos, fake images of ICE shootings, and emotional pleas disconnected from reality and rooted in what is now called suicidal empathy.It would make a perfectly acceptable comedy routine if it weren’t so serious — and so sad.Why professors hate AmericaWhy are so many American professors so anti-American?They live in a country that pays them well to teach their particular flavors of Marxist progressivism. They enjoy robust constitutional protections for speech and inquiry. They’re free to invent theories so eccentric that they wouldn’t survive a staff meeting at a moderately sensible insurance company.And yet they hate America.The late philosopher Roger Scruton coined a useful word for this condition: oikophobia — the fear or hatred of one’s own home.Spend 10 minutes browsing faculty social media — especially in the humanities — and you’ll meet it. In their telling, virtually any other country can do no wrong, while the United States can do nothing right.RELATED: Do they hate Trump — or do they just hate America? Photo by Joseph Prezioso / AFP via Getty ImagesThe logic of learned helplessnessThey lament how the “benevolent” ruler of Venezuela was removed by the bullying United States. If they concede he was a tyrant, they pivot to a different objection: Are we supposed to go around removing every tyrant in the world?Consider the move. Because a nation cannot eliminate all evil everywhere, it must refrain from opposing evil anywhere.It’s a curious moral theory — and it tends to apply only when America, or a conservative administration, acts. In their personal lives and domestic politics, these same professors preach incrementalism. Don’t let the perfect become the enemy of the good. Progress, they assure us, comes in steps.But when Donald Trump — or conservative America generally — is behind an action, oikophobia kicks in and the reasoning faculty abruptly shuts down.TDS as a virtueRecently, James Carville, a sometime professor of political science at Tulane University and a political consultant to various governments abroad, publicly took the Lord’s name in vain by asking God not for national unity or wisdom but for more Trump derangement syndrome. He cheerfully admitted he hates Trump and wants to hate him more.That’s more than just political spite. It’s a descent into madness, wrapped in a violation of the third commandment.This posture has become standard in fields such as political science and the humanities. It feels less like argument than a kind of intellectual surrender — what the apostle Paul describes in Romans 1 as being given over to a “debased mind.”When intellectuals lose the capacity for judgment, the results don’t stay confined to faculty lounges. They spill into institutions, into students, into culture — and into policy.Why are we paying for this?The strangest feature of this situation is that we keep employing these people — often with public funds.Professors at private universities are one thing. Private institutions can hire whomever they please. But many of the loudest performances come from state universities, where salaries are paid by taxpayers.Americans have tolerated this out of respect for the First Amendment. We believe — correctly — that free speech requires tolerating ideas that are foolish, offensive, or absurd.But the First Amendment does not require taxpayers to finance those ideas.Allowing someone to speak differs from obligating the public to underwrite his lectures.From oikophobia to self-hatredOikophobia rarely appears in isolation. It grows out of something deeper — what you might call autophobia: a kind of self-hatred.Professors who despise their country often despise the civilization that produced it — and, eventually, even themselves. You can see the self-contempt in the ideas they teach: young people urged to reject their own bodies, treat biological reality as an inconvenience, and even mutilate themselves in pursuit of identities constructed from will alone.Civilizations that teach their children to hate themselves don’t flourish for long.RELATED: My court fight over DEI at Arizona State isn’t culture-war noise Photo by Robert Alexander/Getty ImagesThe post-Christian academyAnother pattern shows up if you spend enough time around these professors: Many were raised in some form of Christianity and later rejected it.Occasionally they will speak of Jesus as one teacher among many. More often they reject him outright. That rejection isn’t incidental. It’s seed corn. It grows into the rest of the hostility.The America they prefer is an America stripped of its Christian foundations — an America dissolved into a global moral neutrality where Western civilization stays perpetually on trial and every other tradition receives the presumption of innocence.In their view, just as America can do nothing right, Christians can do nothing right either.Meanwhile, almost any spiritual alternative — no matter how strange or historically troubling — earns enthusiastic approval. “Who are you to judge?” becomes the only commandment they reliably enforce.I recall one professor raised in a conservative Baptist home who later converted to what she proudly called “hedonic atheism.” She recounted — with real excitement — paying to sit on the dirt floor of a shaman’s tent and ingest hallucinogenic mushrooms to “open the doors of perception to other dimensions.”Christianity: rejected. Mushrooms with a witch doctor: enlightenment.The simple solutionFuture historians may look back at this era with bewilderment. They’ll ask how a prosperous civilization came to subsidize an entire class of intellectuals devoted to explaining why that civilization was uniquely wicked.Has anything like it happened before?Perhaps.But most civilizations eventually discovered a simple solution. They stopped paying for it.
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