The juries were still refusing to convict—it was called “jury nullification,” and juries were doing it on gun cases too after Hillary Clinton put her ban in effect. Finally, liberal judges started ordering juries to convict, and when they wouldn’t, the judges would just find the accused guilty themselves. The Supreme Court even upheld that travesty until the impeachments and President Marlowe’s pardons.
Now, I sell raw milk to anyone who wants to buy it. I figure if you are an adult, you can decide for yourself what you put into your body. The government has no business being involved.
I had been a liberal, but after I got to really know liberalism, well, count me out.
Puff (Hemp Advocate and Activist)
Puff is clearly feeling it now. He inhales deeply once more before continuing.
You know, I’m just doing my thing. I wasn’t hurting anyone. But they were putting people in jail for years, making it dangerous to buy. Why? The constitutional conservatives supported decriminalization, so I was with them.
After all, you can’t get more constitutional than weed. I mean, they all grew hemp. Madison, Jefferson, Lincoln, all those guys. George Washington’s wig? Made of hemp. I’m serious—weed’s as American as apple pie!
Brad Fields (Insurance Salesman)
Sure, I fired up a fattie or two in school. Everyone did. And if letting the stoners get stoned—which they were doing already—was all it took to get a bunch of libertarians fighting beside us for the freedoms the liberals wanted to take, I was like, “Go ahead and inhale!”
Tamara Hayes Smith (Professor/Activist)
It was tough. There is always a tension between the pragmatic and the principled, but at a certain point the choice becomes whether or not a given hill is worth dying on. Conservatives faced the question of whether making sure pot smokers couldn’t legally buy the pot that they were already buying was worth risking the entire republic. And the answer was no.
Chapter Eleven: Target Academia
Academia was key high ground for the insurgency. Not only did it have enormous prestige that progressives could harness to gain support for their plans, but it provided progressives a perfect venue for indoctrination. The constitutional conservatives found it an irresistible target as their power—and academia’s arrogance—grew.
David Chang (Conservative Media Host)
The controversial Chang makes it a point to mention his Ivy League credentials not so much for the sake of vanity but because it emphasizes his rejection of the values and beliefs his professors tried to inculcate in him. “I came from the belly of the beast,” he says. “I experienced the best they had and rejected it.”
On his shows, particularly in the early years, academic antics were a staple of his commentary. “The universities are supposed to preserve and defend our culture, and I was appalled by what they chose to preserve and defend.”
You could always count on filling a couple hours a week with the progressive nonsense at some college somewhere. They thought they were safe in their little academic bubble, and that no one would know what they were doing. Wrong!
I loved to shine a spotlight on them and catch them in the act enforcing some idiotic feminist speech code or having some sort of weird sex festival for freshmen. But what started happening is that normal people began wondering why they were getting taxed for this kind of crap—much less paying six figures for their kids to go to a traditional university, when they could get a real education via the web for a fraction of the price with no nonsense.
As constitutional conservatives, we began to realize that the entire higher education system was a giant scam designed to take money from people who contribute to society and transfer it to layabout academics and their enablers while simultaneously indoctrinating our young people in the precepts of collectivism. And in the Obama years, there was a “higher education bubble”—a law professor named Glenn Reynolds, who had a very popular site called Instapundit, coined that term. Well, by the 2010s, the bubble was already popping.
We started to identify academia, as it was then structured, as what it was—an enemy. Then we needed to move swiftly and mercilessly to assist the natural processes of the market in changing it into something that would not only be useful to society again but that was no longer a subsidized petri dish for the virus of progressivism.
The higher education scam—well, it was technically more of a racket—was actually kind of brilliant in a sinister way. The higher education establishment built its success on two pillars, both of which have crumbled over the last 30 years.
The first was the ridiculous notion that everyone could and should go to college. No, everyone couldn’t and everyone shouldn’t. Most people shouldn’t go to college, at least as it was commonly understood back then. Then, it was a four- to six-year time-out from life, with giant lecture hall classes and not much in the way of relevant learning, all for incredible amounts of money. And the focus was on having had the experience—of walking out with the diploma—rather than actual learning. Some schools even gave up on grades—it was simply enough to have been accepted as a high schooler. Four years later you got a piece of paper and no one checked or cared whether you actually learned anything.
If we had had a K-12 educational system whose purpose was to educate kids to a decent level instead of to provide jobs for teachers and administrative parasites, most people would have walked out of high school with the kind of core competency required to be a valuable citizen. As it was then, many of our “colleges” were devoted to teaching students the things they should have learned in high school.
We did not have “higher” education; we mostly just had “longer” education.
The false notion that everyone should go to college created an artificial need for colleges. Look at the vast array of so-called colleges that was out there then, including community colleges. We had to face facts—most students at these institutions didn’t need any more school. They needed to get their asses to work.
So, you got young people who weren’t really focused on—or good at—academic work taking valuable time out of their lives to struggle through basic courses that added zero value to their marketability. Worse, they were taking on debt to do it. And staying in school longer meant delaying adulthood—that and marriage penalties in law helped lead to extended adolescent periods that we had never seen before in our society.
We finally just cut the baloney about expanding minds and growing as individuals and all that crap—the college scam was a full employment program for a liberal educator class who made their living pretending to educate students who, in return, pretended to learn.
The so-called prestige institutions were little better, dominated by phony majors and nonsense courses, with ever-dropping standards that ensured that something like half the students had an “A” average if their school bothered giving grades at all.
People—parents paying the bills, employers hiring these grads, and even the students themselves—started realizing that when everyone is outstanding, no one is.
This whole apparatus was funded by the government through student loans that could either never be repaid or anchored the graduates (assuming they ever graduated, which a high proportion did not) in debt for decades. And for what? At the crappy schools, the diplomas meant nothing, and at the good ones, they were usually just a souvenir of a four-year vacation full of cheap beer and cheesy sexual experimentation—with a $350,000 price tag.