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Remember when The Wall Street Journal generally held respectably conservative opinions? Good times. But a recent opinion piece – “The Alienated ‘Knowledge Class’ Could Turn Violent” – betrays a curiously Left-wing argument that smells suspiciously of blackmail.
The article’s fear-mongering teaser line reads, “Societies that exile their intellectuals risk turning them into revolutionaries. It happened in the 1970s.” Jukka Savolainen, a professor of sociology at Wayne State University, begins his piece by noting that violent Left-wing radicals of the ‘70s such as the Weather Underground in the U.S., West Germany’s Red Army Faction, and Italy’s Red Brigades were composed largely not of “the oppressed proletariat of Marxist theory, but the disillusioned children of privilege and university lecture halls.” He writes that the radicalization of such academic domestic terrorists (my label, not his) as Barack Obama mentor Bill Ayers and his literal partner-in-crime Bernardine Dohrn “stemmed not from poverty but from moral outrage and estrangement from institutional power.”
That’s being rather generous. To be more precise, the Weather Underground’s radicalization stemmed not from “moral outrage and estrangement from institutional power” but from the Marxist imperative to “kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, Kill your parents,” as Ayers put it. That doesn’t bespeak “moral outrage”; that bespeaks a desire to smash morality itself.
But let’s move on. Savolainen warns that a “similar dynamic” is emerging in the U.S. today. The Trump administration’s dismantling of university DEI programs and slashing of academic research funding, he writes, “risks producing a new class of people who are highly educated but institutionally excluded. History suggests this group may become a source of unrest—and possibly violence.”
This may come as a surprise to Prof. Savolainen, but the reality is that the radicalized educated class has long been institutionally entrenched, not excluded, and it has already turned violent. Witness, for example, the number of teachers and professors who populate the brownshirts of Antifa, an explicitly violent network. Or the students and professors who dominate pro-Hamas protests on campuses all across the country and through the West, which have targeted Jewish students and even Jewish professors with violence and intimidation. Educated subversives like these weren’t radicalized because they were pushed to the margins of an oppressive society but because they were privileged elites at the most prestigious institutions of higher learning, indoctrinated to hate everything about their own civilization and to tear it down by any means necessary.
These revolutionaries integrated into these institutions and others over the course of decades precisely in order to undermine them – or more accurately, to capture and repurpose them. I once had a professor confess to me that he and his fellow Left-wing radicals gave up on marching in the streets to make the “long march through the institutions” instead, by becoming professors. “We didn’t see it as ‘selling out,’” he said. “We saw it as ‘buying in.’”
Anyway, Savolainen argues that such “status frustration is building” among the “knowledge class,” who have been “disproportionately harmed” by the Trump administration’s agenda. And so their radicalism is escalating:
President Trump’s policies could intensify this dynamic. By hollowing out state infrastructure and devaluing educational institutions, the administration risks creating a surplus of ideologically driven people with no outlet for their talents… Most won’t resort to violence, but history shows that a small, committed vanguard can inflict enormous damage.
He goes on to warn that
Defunding and demonizing higher education may offer short-term political gains, but doing so carries long-term dangers. By targeting perceived left-wing strongholds, some on the political right may cultivate the very radicalism they fear.
Perceived left-wing strongholds? Maybe the fact that more than 80% of Harvard professors identify as “liberal” and only 1% as conservative has something to do with that perception. Or the finding that professors donating to Democrat candidates outnumber those giving to Republicans by a ratio of 95 to 1. They’re not perceived left-wing strongholds; they’re undeniably so.
“Societies that exile their intellectuals risk turning them into revolutionaries,” Savolainen concludes. Gee, this feels like a thinly-veiled Left-wing threat, or blackmail – from the Wall Street Journal, no less: try to purge universities of violent, radical intellectuals and you just might end up with – wait for it – violent, radical intellectuals.
On a related note, Harvard Law professor emeritus and Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferer Laurence Tribe claimed last Monday on MSNBC’s The Last Word that Trump “is a president who hates intellect, who despises the symbol of excellence in the world of higher education around the world.”
This is patently ridiculous, and exactly what one would expect from the propaganda outlet MSNBC and the unhinged Tribe. Contrary to professors Tribe and Savolainen, the Trump administration and its MAGA supporters aren’t unfairly “demonizing” a politically neutral, noble-minded professorial class; we are calling them out as the far-Left subversives that the overwhelming majority of them are. We aren’t salivating at the prospect of tearing down higher education; we are trying to restore the educational mission of once-respectable institutions that have degenerated into indoctrination mills and launching pads for foreign spies, DEI operatives, and violent, Jew-hating radicals.
The Right isn’t anti-intellectual; we aren’t the ones intentionally dumbing down the younger generations. We are the ones who value education and want to preserve and build upon the glorious legacy of “the best that has been thought and said,” as Matthew Arnold put it. It’s the so-called intellectuals, or a disproportionate majority of them, who have perverted higher education and sought to dismantle the grand edifice of Western greatness. Ever since the Frankfurt school of cultural Marxists in the early decades of the 20th century, universities have been Ground Zero for propagating and/or conceiving the worst, most destructive ideas that humanity has ever produced, from socialism to Critical Theory. These citadels of hateful frauds have turned their back on the cultural giants of the past, and devoted themselves instead to brainwashing impressionable young minds into despising and violently sabotaging their own heritage.
Sorry, Wall Street Journal, but in MAGA America we don’t negotiate with subversives and terrorists. It’s the beginning of the end for the neo-Marxist “knowledge class.”
