The professoriate’s weaponization of ‘controversy’

The creation of America’s ‘culture war’ was the goal of academia’s totalitarian rulers from the beginning.

Although it often seems as if Americans are sharply divided into fanatically opposed political camps, this has not been my experience. Certainly, there is intense partisanship, but most Americans I have encountered recently have been, by and large, a bit flummoxed by the intense controversies that have riven their society. I don’t know if this reflects the overall feelings of the “silent majority,” but I would not be surprised if it does.

For example, I’ve heard many people express bewilderment that there is any controversy over who can use certain bathrooms. They think men ought to use the men’s room and women ought to use the women’s room. Why on earth, they wonder, is anyone contesting this?

This not only confuses them but also renders them somewhat apathetic. The thing is so mad that there seems to be no point in fighting it. As a result, the people generating the controversy tend to win by default.

The question is: Why is there any controversy in the first place? It seems obvious that trans people can live their own lives while respecting the general consensus that anyone with a penis shouldn’t be allowed in the women’s room. I imagine that a great many trans people actually agree and are willing to accommodate the consensus so long as their personal autonomy is respected. Yet the controversy persists.

The most important factor in this persistence is likely academia. The academy’s weakness for political and social radicalism is long-standing, but there is no doubt that it has intensified in recent years to the point of outright derangement. This is not helped by the takeover of major universities by a totalitarian dictatorship of the professoriate that not only promotes but imposes radicalism on more or less everyone—including Americans well outside the university itself.

In some ways, academia’s political and social extremism is not surprising. Radicalism tends to compound radicalism, especially when its acolytes are sealed in a hermetic bubble protected from reality by ideological blockade. Once people begin to believe passionately in a certain ideology, their fanaticism is only intensified when they are prevented from knowing that criticism of this ideology even exists. The end result is and must be oppression, crime, and violence.

What is remarkable about the totalitarianization of academia is how long it has persisted and the impunity it has enjoyed. While the professoriate regime has been criticized, almost nothing has been done to counter it, even though almost everything it does is either unethical or outright illegal. It was only over the past year, during which the professoriate regime sent out its stormtroopers on a rampage of antisemitic and anti-American criminality and violence, that a backlash finally took shape. Indeed, the contribution to Donald Trump’s reelection made by the regime’s overreach is still underestimated.

The extent of the damage done by the professoriate’s seditious activity has been severely underestimated as well. It is not an exaggeration to say that almost all of the most ferocious “culture war” controversies that beset American society, from gender radicalism to the emergence of a leftist racial essentialism and antisemitism, have been generated by the academy.

This is not to say that all of America’s domestic controversies have been the nefarious work of the professoriate regime. The race problem, for example, has bedeviled American society almost from its origins. It would persist in the absence of any academy whatsoever. The enormous economic inequalities that beset American society would also be a source of considerable friction no matter what.

Nonetheless, one cannot underestimate the professoriate’s extraordinary success in slashing American society to pieces.

This success is not a coincidence. Literally from the moment the movement that eventually conquered and colonized the universities was officially founded, the fracturing of American society through the creation and cultivation of controversy was one of its primary goals.

The plan for the conquest of the universities was largely the creation of Students for a Democratic Society, a radical organization founded by and composed of far-left university students. SDS was both ground zero for the New Left of the 1960s and the eventual fount of several terrorist organizations—most infamously, the Weather Underground.

The organization’s goals were set out in tortuous but succinct prose in its 1962 Port Huron Statement, which presents a dystopian view of the United States and outlines the measures necessary to redeem it.

Most of these recommendations are standard leftist gobbledygook, but it is quite clear that SDS viewed the primary vehicle for achieving them as the university system. Among the weapons to be employed in this campaign was the weaponization of “controversy.”

As the statement put it: “A new left must start controversy across the land, if national policies and national apathy are to be reversed. The ideal university is a community of controversy, within itself and in its effects on communities beyond.”

To say that the totalitarian movement SDS founded—institutionalized in the form of the professoriate regime—was wildly successful in this endeavor would be something of an understatement.

For example, the concept of “white privilege” was created by literally a single academic in a single paper. Peggy McIntosh’s 1988 screed bore the appropriately ridiculous title “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” and included such revelatory insights as “I can be pretty sure of finding people who would be willing to talk with me and advise me about my next steps, professionally.”

The effect of this blithering was literally epochal. Through the professoriate’s entryism and exploitation of academia’s centuries-long accumulation of prestige, expertise, and moral authority, a clumsy attempt at vulgar Freudianism would define the progressive left’s approach to race for several generations—especially in academia itself.

It is essential to note in this regard that progressive leftists’ overall goal concerning race is to make the problem of racism insoluble. This does not mean the problem of American racism does not exist and measures should not be taken to address it. It does mean that progressives and especially progressive academics have no interest whatsoever in addressing it.

The reason is obvious: Without the weaponization of race, one of the professoriate regime’s primary means of emotional blackmail and political suppression of opponents would be gone. Controversy could not be started and the “community of controversy” would collapse. With it would collapse the regime’s power. This is, needless to say, unacceptable. It is, in fact, an existential threat. Thus, the race controversy must continue at all costs, including people’s lives and livelihoods.

The same is true of all the other “controversies” the regime has started and sustained. It is no coincidence that Jewish protester Paul Kessler was killed in 2023 by an academic. The murder was the logical endgame of a regime that wields “controversy” as a weapon. If the regime’s stormtroopers must kill in order to impose the “controversies” it has manufactured—in this case, the “controversy” over the Jews’ right to exist—so be it.

One should not underestimate the threat posed by an institutionally powerful totalitarian regime’s insistence on weaponizing controversies—some of them quite legitimate, many others not—to impose and enhance its power. A totalitarian canton in a democratic republic can only be an existential threat to that republic. Paul Kessler paid the price for this threat.

The question for Americans who want to live is how long they will suffer this regime to exist and, if they choose not to, how long it will take to smash it. The truly ominous question, however, is whether or not it will already be too late.