Brainwashed

by Ben Shapiro

  People like junk food? That’s just too bad for them. “I want to get to the point where people are in the hallway and see a vending machine and say, ‘That’s bad, that shouldn’t be there,’ in the same way as if they saw a cigarette vending machine,” says Tom Farley of Tulane University.25 Winning that battle “will not be easy,” says a determined Tony Robbins of Tufts University. “People need to be creative about [defeating junk food], but tobacco was no minor opponent, either.”26

  This is all the fault of profit. If there were no profits to be made, no one would eat fast food and everyone would look like Cindy Crawford and Matt Damon. And no one would smoke, and the air would be clean, and no one would die of lung cancer.

  Yeah, right. Besides, whatever happened to the right to choose?

  GREEDY CAPITALIST PIGS

  The commie wing of the university system doesn’t just hate capitalism; it hates capitalists. And nothing signifies capitalists better than rich white guys.

  There’s something inherently wrong with being rich. It means you stole from others. It means you’re racist. It means you can afford to bend the law, to bias politics, to kill peasants.

  Oy.

  Professor Paul Ehrlich of Stanford sneers: “Wealth . . . keeps poor people and nations relatively powerless to seek equality.”27 Yeah, things would be better if we were all poor. Then we could run around beating each other with sticks to “seek equality.”

  UCLA Professor Robert Watson explains that professors are more noble than everyone else and therefore despise money: “people who are willing to give up the extreme wealth that some careers offer, preferring instead the opportunity to teach young people and to retain intellectual independence, tend also to be people who will question the self-worship and money-worship of American culture.”28 Thank goodness we have professors who are so pure and altruistic!

  Professor Muldavin, the self-described communist, quoted Plato in class one day, saying: “Ignorant wealth is more evil than poverty.”29 He didn’t cite a source for the quotation, but the point he was making was clear: If you’re rich and not a leftist, you’re evil.

  Muldavin also assigned a propaganda piece called LA’s Lethal Air. The author states, “For the well-to-do, however, one person’s misfortune is another person’s gain.”30 Funny, that’s not what I think when I see a poor person’s dog get hit by a car. Or when I hear that someone has lost his job. One of the greatest things about the capitalist system is that we all prosper together or we fail together. A recession doesn’t just hit the poor, and neither does an economic wave. The better the poor guy does, the better it is for everyone’s pocketbook.

  EVIL CORPORATIONS

  If the well-off are symbols of capitalism, then corporations are the well-off to the nth degree. Professors hate corporations. Corporations rape the environment. Corporations exploit poor workers. Corporations are tyrannical, exceeding their moral bounds for the evil of evils, profit.

  To Professor Muldavin, corporations are exploiters of the Third World: “Loss of control is a historical and social process. In the Third World, the loss is by local communities and increase is by large and distant entities.”31 Spooky stuff.

  Professor Robert Watson weighed in on corporations, as he does on most topics, in a submission to the UCLA Daily Bruin. “You don’t need universities to assure Americans that . . . big corporations are kind-hearted and good for everyone—they hire publicists, they own the media outlets, they buy the legislators,” he said. “American universities have thrived, like the society as a whole, because we have a system for resisting the natural tendency of the authorities to want to dictate belief.”32 Like most of his other views, Watson’s anti-corporate tendencies stem from his rebellion against authority. And he passes the same garbage on to the “thousand UCLA students who have worked with [him].”33

  Watson’s counterpart, University of Texas Professor Dana Cloud, wrote a submission to the Daily Texan, which she called “Pledge for the workers.” Her revised “Pledge of Allegiance” reads: “I pledge allegiance to all the ordinary people around the world, / to the laid off Enron workers and the WorldCom workers / the maquiladora workers / and the sweatshop workers from New York to Indonesia, / who labor not under God but under the heel of multinational corporations.”34 From this letter, you’d think multinational corporations rape cows, eat children, and drop nuclear waste into preschools. What a load of garbage.

  UCLA Professor Marilyn Raphael sees corporations as disgusting polluters. “If people get away with polluting,” she says, “you know industry gets away with it.”35 This is flawed logic. People get away with polluting because the government does not have the resources to oversee every single individual. Corporations, on the other hand, have government employees on top of them every moment of every day.

  A text by the Labor/Community Watchdog in Los Angeles, assigned by Professor Muldavin, agrees with Raphael. According to that text, corporate executives must “assume the lion’s share of the responsibility for the environmental dangers to public health and the threat to the planet’s long-term viability.”36 Corporations spend their time “Defiling Politics, Culture, and the Air,”37 and they “determine our choices through advertising, market share, pricing, and other forms of power in the marketplace.”38 Did you get that? Corporations are brainwashing customers with advertising. They’re taking control of our brains. Cue music from The Matrix.

  Another assigned text in Professor Muldavin’s course says, “Today’s claim by corporations of an unfettered right to allocate wealth we all helped to create may be closer to the concept of the divine right of kings than it is to the principles of democracy.”39 This is psycho. The divine right of kings would allow corporations to chain workers to their chairs and pay them nothing, motivating them with a whip. In reality, corporations usually pay well. And as for the right to allocate wealth, if you make it, you take it. Corporations can divvy it up however they see fit.

  When I took his Geography 4 class at UCLA, Professor Jurgen Essletzbichler explained industrial capitalism. His class notes had computer graphics in them to make the learning more visually accessible. The cartoons he posted for industrial capitalism were 1) a fat-cat industrialist riding in a carriage alongside a skeleton symbolizing death40 and 2) a fat-cat industrialist representing England, with arms coming out of the head grabbing less industrialized countries.41 Wonderful. I love the smell of indoctrination in the morning.

  Essletzbichler also posted a graphic that was supposed to represent trickle-down economics. The graphic showed a fat cat industrialist standing atop a globe, urinating upon the lower half of the globe. Not exactly an objective depiction of the mechanics of an economic theory.

  Apparently at a loss for words, Essletzbichler showed the movie Roger and Me during lecture time.42Roger and Me is a documentary about layoffs by General Motors at its plant in Flint, Michigan. The protagonist, Michael Moore (author of Stupid White Men and Dude, Where’s My Country?), chases around GM chairman Roger B. Smith. As Amazon.com reviewer Sean Axmaker puts it, “Moore ambushes his corporate subjects.”43 According to the professor, however, this wasn’t an ambush—it was an accurate depiction of real life events. It showed the “downside of globalization.”44

  Professors also push the notion that corporations are all corrupt. Professor Eugene White of Rutgers University stated that the recent spate of corporate corruption scandals is “all very typical.”45 Professor Jeffrey Garten, dean of the School of Management at Yale, concurs: “I think it is fair to say that there was nobody in the business community who is not implicated in this in some way.”46 As the Washington Post reported, Harvard Business Professor Jay Lorsch originally believed that corporate corruption was relatively rare; but “[n]ow he’s not so sure.”47

  All of this is having an impact on the students. A poll of college seniors revealed that a plurality, 28 percent, chose business as a profession in which “an ‘anything goes’ attitude [is] most likely to lead to success.” This ranked above j
ournalism, law, teaching, science/medicine, and civil service, among others.48 When students were asked whether the only difference between Enron and other businesses was that “Enron got caught,” 56 percent agreed, and only 41 percent disagreed.49 Meanwhile, only 10 percent of the general public felt that corporate corruption occurred at most companies.50 This contrast is frightening. If college students think business is evil, it’s easy to see what they think of capitalism.

  THE BIG LABOR/UNIVERSITY ALLIANCE

  There’s some dirty business going on between the professors and the labor unions. Labor unions are notoriously anti-capitalist. Leninists thought of a Marxist Revolution as a revolution of the workers against the “aristocracy.” Labor unions were needed decades ago, when collective bargaining power was a must; now, labor unions are merely a nuisance, allying with the Democratic party to thwart the workings of the market. Professors are buddy-buddy with Big Labor, and they encourage students to become just as buddy-buddy.

  A 1996 report in the New York Times detailed this burgeoning friendship. According to the article, professors nationwide are advising students to become union organizers. Professors are also giving pro bono courses to union officials. As the Times writes, “today’s intellectuals promise that their support for labor will prove far more substantial than mere talk at teach-ins.” In short, professors are supporting labor by brainwashing their students. Following are some details of this incestuous relationship:

  Cornell University professors held a conference with the AFL-CIO on how to do more organizing. . . . in early October, several dozen academic luminaries will join union leaders at Columbia University for a 1960’s style teach-in intended to give the academic world’s imprimatur to labor’s new leadership and to explore how intellectuals can do more to advance the goals of organized labor.

  Similar teach-ins will be held at a dozen other schools, including the University of Wisconsin, the University of Florida, Eastern Illinois University, Wayne State University in Detroit and the University of Texas at El Paso . . .

  . . . Acknowledging that their new-found friendship with labor is not altogether altruistic, officials with the association say they hope the AFL-CIO will back their fights to preserve tenure, win raises and reverse cuts in education spending.51

  At UCLA, professors counseled the AFL-CIO on how to institute its Union Summer program. Over one thousand students worked for unions and helped set up unions at small factories all over Los Angeles.52

  Scary isn’t it? It’s even scarier when you look up just what the AFL-CIO, the other half of the university/Big Labor alliance, is promoting. Their Web site carries their mission statement which says: “We will fight for an agenda for working families at all levels of government. We will empower state federations. We will build a broad progressive coalition that speaks out for social and economic justice.”53 As discussed earlier, progressive always means extremely liberal/communist, and “social and economic justice” always means governmental redistribution of income.

  In practice, this means that the AFL-CIO overwhelmingly pushes Democratic candidates. They contributed $712,284 to Democratic federal candidates during the 2002 election cycle. Other labor unions contribute even more. The Laborers Union and Teamsters Union gave a combined $2,211,121 to Democratic federal candidates during the 2002 election cycle.54

  Union activism is a central cause supported by the professors. And so it becomes a central cause for the student body as well.

  THE CHINA SYNDROME

  Take China, Cuba, or any other socialist/communist country. If you ask a professor what he thinks of them, you’ll probably get a thumbs-up. China has a good economic system, recently weakened by its slow transition to capitalism. Cuba has a great health care system. Pick any socialist country out of a hat, and you can guarantee professors will believe it to be superior to the United States.

  I call this admiration for communism/socialism the China Syndrome.

  The prototype for this disorder is Professor Muldavin of UCLA. According to Muldavin, China is a “model of development.”55 He lauds the Maoist development model, which he says “was founded on a strategy of self-reliance . . . its successes in such areas as education, health and social welfare, and the development of both rural and urban infrastructure are widely acknowledged.”56 He scorns China’s slow growth toward capitalism: “There are a number of structural environmental and social problems in the reforms that will not be solved, indeed are actually exacerbated, by continued transition to a market-oriented economy.”57 (Translation: Moving toward a capitalist system doesn’t help China or its citizens—capitalism hurts them.)

  Muldavin continues: “One of the most disturbing things to have transpired is the dismantling of China’s social welfare system . . . I saw overnight, within two or three years, the complete collapse of these systems. Nothing— no state agencies, no ‘private sector initiative’—is stepping in to take up the slack.”58 Therefore, obviously, the only solution is a totalitarian communist regime. And their social welfare system wasn’t working too well in the first place—this is the country with a one-child policy, remember?

  When confronted by a student with the fact that Mao’s Great Leap Forward led to the deaths of thirty million Chinese citizens in the largest man-made famine in world history, Muldavin answered, “I certainly did not mean to whitewash this famine. . . . [The famine] does not discount in any way other aspects of collective economy that may be beneficial, nor that there may be negative aspects to privatization.”59 Oh. So killing thirty million people doesn’t discount a development strategy. By that token, Stalin’s plan, which killed only twenty million Russians, must be considered a brilliant development strategy.

  If they like China, they love Cuba.

  “In Cuba, there seems to be an even-handedness about how resources, admittedly limited, are allocated, and there is universal health care free of charge with an extensive nationwide delivery system,” says Professor Steven Schendel of Stanford University. “Yes, there are shortages of materials, but there is a lot of compassion.”60 And of course, we all know how much compassion helps when you’re dying of cancer. Sorry, Mrs. Esquivel, we don’t have the means to do chemotherapy and you’re going to die because of it, but we feel bad for you.

  Professor Sharon Frey of Saint Louis University believes that “From a sense of community, global perspective and compassion they are way ahead of us.”61 Isn’t this the country that relies on sugar production to fuel its pathetic way of life?

  Professor Mario Coyula of Harvard, a visiting lecturer from Cuba, is proud that Cuba didn’t fall after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He’s also proud of Cuba’s lack of a class system: “People set up tables in the street for playing dominoes. There is always a corner grocery where people hang out. It is an atmosphere in which the social classes are leveled.”62 Now there’s something to tell the world about. People playing dominoes. Over here, we spend our time creating a massive economy upon which the entire world relies. Over there, they play dominoes.

  “NO MORE PROPERTY RIGHTS!”

  This is the crux of the matter. To solve all of the “shortcomings” of capitalism, professors advocate a new definition of property. Property rights must be abolished, they say, to make the system more equitable for everyone. This is communism. It was Karl Marx who said, “the theory of the communists may be summed up in the single sentence: abolition of private property.”63This is what professors want.

  “Working against hunger requires a fundamental rethinking of the meaning of ownership,” reads an assigned text in a UCLA geography course.64 When people are hungry, damn private ownership. That’s the strategy.

  Professor Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School feels that the Constitution impedes progress. According to Tribe, the Constitution has a “built-in bias against redistribution of wealth.” Such a bias benefits “entrenched wealth.” As Thomas Sowell says, “When the rule of law is seen as a bias . . . the principles of the American Constitution [have been] quie
tly repealed.”65

  Abolishing private property means the unlimited right to redistribute wealth. “If the cause of poverty is the grossly unequal distribution of the world’s wealth, then to end poverty, and with it the population crisis, we must redistribute that wealth, among nations and within them,” says far-left Professor Barry Commoner.66 And what gives Professor Commoner the right to take someone’s property and hand it over to someone else? Only if there were no property rights would such a thing be acceptable.

  In pragmatic terms, these Marxists are looking for a plan which would “involve a massive redistribution of wealth through taxation of higher-income people, primarily those making $100,000 or more, and even more significantly, far higher corporate taxes,” according to Paul Ehrlich in an assigned text in UCLA’s Geography 5 course.67 Also, according to Ehrlich, “Wasteful consumption in rich countries must be reduced to allow for needed growth in poor countries. . . . Our sociopolitical systems also must undergo dramatic revision in the direction of increasing equity at all levels.”68 In a world designed by the intellectuals, the “rich” would slave their lives away and then have their money robbed from them and given to the poor.

  The Democratic Socialists of America, the largest socialist organization in the US, is riddled with university faculty. Honorary chairs include Professor Bogdan Denitch of City University of New York and Professor Cornel West of Princeton University. Professor Frances Fox Piven of City University of New York is a vice president of the organization, as is Professor Rosemary Ruetheur of the Graduate Theological Union.69 The DSA statement of purpose says: “We are socialists because we reject an international economic order sustained by private profit.”70

  RED ALERT

  Not all professors are communists. In fact, the vast majority of them are not. But there is a concerted movement within universities to revive the “glory” that was once socialism. They do it by minimizing the value of capitalism which they say is unfair to the lower classes. They do it by making “profit” a dirty word. They do it by demonizing the rich as leeches sucking blood from the hard-working poor. They do it by depicting corporations as rapists of the environment and the Third World. They do it by allying with Big Labor. They do it by glorifying communist dictatorships like China and Cuba. They do it by preaching a re-evaluation of the very definition of private property.