A Skewed Worldview

It's a new day in America. And not just because we've elected a foreign-born America-hating Islamo-Marxist babykiller with no experience to the highest office in the land.

For proof, I direct you to Phi Beta Cons, where David French and Robert VerBruggen are urging college Republicans to "stop whining" about their persecution at the hands of the Liberal Elite.

Here's French:

If you are afraid professors won't grade you fairly, put them to the test and respond appropriately if their bias manifests itself (you'll be surprised how well you might do). If you don't think people will like you, grow a thicker skin and see what happens. I still have dear lefty friends from my law school days, and I never pulled any punches in my conversations with them (and still don't). But, above all. Stop whining. Please.

And here's VerBruggen:

College cons, if you want to say that professors present a skewed worldview to students—or even that conservative ideas often get mocked — fine, but knock it off with the whole I-can't-even-speak-in-this-police-state persecution complex.

Every word of this is a sermon in itself. Better yet, French and VerBruggen have come tantalizingly close to the realization that even if every single claim these malcontents make about college life were true, they'd still be crazy and stupid and unworthy of reasonable people's respect.

Even if every teacher in academe were trying to tear conservatism from the American soil like so much crabgrass, even if every class required a pledge of allegiance to the Rainbow Flag, even if every paper were graded on the basis of its agreement with the thought of Luce Irigaray, the average College Republican would still be an intellectually flabby, self-pitying whiner who deserved a swift kick in the slats.

In reality, however, an untold number of these pobrecitos are getting hassled by the Gender-Neutral Authority Figure not for lovin' America too much, but for waving a copy of Ken Ham's Dinosaurs in Eden around in biology class, or citing Conservapedia's entry on settled science as a primary source, or insisting that "zOMG u loosers Hilter wuz totly a librul bwahaha!!1"

Recognizing that these students have a persecution complex may not be quite as insightful, by my standards, as recognizing that they're willfully ignorant layabouts who are trying to drag America's schools down to the level of their own cherished inadequacies. And it's definitely not as insightful as recognizing that a certain humility is appropriate among students, no matter how many books by John Stossel they may've read: for instance, they probably shouldn't be encouraged to, in essence, self-grade their own papers and tests, and then attack teachers for failing to validate their unparalleled grasp of African collaboration with the slave trade (or what have you).

Still, this is as much as we can reasonably expect from this quarter at this time, and I welcome it wholeheartedly. I'm not sure when young conservatives decided that having their ill-informed pretensions coddled and nurtured by teachers was an entitlement on a par with voting rights or equal treatment in the workplace, but if French and VerBruggen can do anything to disabuse them of that notion, I'll gladly buy 'em a round of cruelty-free piña coladas at the gay Stalinist vegan fetish club of their choice.

(Illustration at top via The Onion.)