On December 5, 2023, some of the Poison Ivy League sent their presidents to testify before Congress about antisemitism on their campuses. Claudine Gay appeared from Harvard, Sally Kornbluth from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Liz Magill from University of Pennsylvania (UPenn). These three women with initials after their names are highly educated, left-wing elitists and it is clear they did not prepare for the encounter. Likely they thought they were too bright and too savvy to get rope-a-doped by mere U.S. Representatives. The funny thing is they were testifying about antisemitism and the question that sunk their respective ships was about whether or not calling for a Jewish genocide violated their respective university’s code of conduct.
In other words, they got tangled up in a question they should have anticipated. And they got mangled because they were totally unprepared. Even Hillary reads a room better than these three unwise women.
Magill said that advocating for a Jewish genocide might… might … be a violation of UPenn’s code of conduct but only “if speech becomes conduct.” In other words, if you killed all of the Jews in the world, then maybe… perhaps… UPenn would view this as problematic. Even Hitler would skate on the UPenn definition of antisemitism since although he killed 6 million Jews, he did not commit total genocide.
As Magill said, it all depends on context.
Rather than delve into the wreckage, let’s just leave it at this. Magill has quit, Gay is being urged to quit but is fully supported by the Harvard Alumni Association, despite the fact that her actions have cost Harvard an estimated $1 billion in donations and it’s only Monday. Some donors are pulling donations, some students and faculty are pushing back in favor of antisemitism, and—what interested me most—is we saw how utterly stupid, feckless, unprepared, and ridiculous these university elitist are.
This underscores how unprepared the elite academic population can be when faced with actual issues. They live in the land of make-believe.
A long time ago, I was talking to an intellectual elitist about environmental-friendly urban planning. She was pleasant enough, although not even Jill Biden is as impressed with her own academic credentials as this woman. Her idea was that academics would design a city with no input from residents. Everyone lived in apartments—you could live in complex 1 or 2. And there were only two floorplans. You either got an efficiency or a three-bedroom unit. Power for the city was generated from a large tank of plankton that somehow produced electricity. An electrical monorail ran from one end of the city to the other; no cars were permitted but there were plenty of bike trails. The roof of the hospital was flat and covered with sod so that grass could grow there and keep the hospital cool. Shopping was reserved for certain parts of town, where there were also restaurants, coffee shops, pubs, and, of course, marijuana dispensaries.
Strangely, nobody planned for a church or any other house of worship. No one planned for water purification, sewage treatment, or garbage pickup. There was no dump. There were also no veterinarians, places to ride horseback, golf courses, or shooting ranges. Nobody thought to include a steakhouse.
I was amazed by her idea that a tank of water heated by the sun and growing plankton could generate any energy, much less enough energy to run a large apartment complex. I asked how it worked. She did not know, and she said this with a sort of misplaced pride. It had never been designed or even tried. There were no calculations, no plans, no data at all. She could not explain to me how photosynthesis in plankton could be converted to energy. When I asked—again like Alice in Wonderland—why she thought it would work, she just said:
“It’s theoretical.”
She said it in a way that was both dismissive and pleasant, with a wave of her hand, sort of like she was talking as kindly as she could to a mentally challenged child.
And I soon discovered that, like only have two apartment floorplans and allowing a small team of people to plan an entire city with zero input from residents or retailers or businesses, the entire little town was just make-believe.
“It’s theoretical.”
I heard that a dozen times when I asked about garbage and sewage and office buildings. I was starting to think “theoretical” meant “stupid.”
In science or medicine, if you want to speculate on something—like a cure for cancer or a nonopioid pain reliever—you have to at least bring some data and evidence to the table. You can’t just make something up, the idea has to have some merit.
The philosophy behind all this is make-believism. It is the idea that elitists are too bright and busy to deal with the pesky details imposed by reality, physics, and finances, so they hand things off to the less-smart people who are charged with making things work. Ironically, elitists have a lot of contempt for these people anchored in reality.
More than once I heard the exasperated but patiently articulated cry, “It’s theoretical” as if it were not an excuse but a high calling. The elitists’ call to prayer, as it were. To a theoretician, the theory is the difficult part—actually making it happen was nothing. Idiots were the ones who made things happen.
Imagine if all Steve Jobs did was imagine an iPhone but never could actually produce one. This run-in with academicians is indicative of how leftists and elitists tend to approach problems:
They find something they do not like. It does not have to actually be a problem. In fact, it may not even be anything real.
They then advocate completely destroying or abolishing all of the things related to the problem. Scorched earth.
Once it is gone or nearly gone, they start to think about what might work instead. It is important that this step not be done until the second step has been completed.
However, the elitists do not actually produce anything, they simply hand off the difficult tasks to working people (the sub-elitists) and demand that they figure it out. If the working people cannot make the theory work, then the make-believers criticize them for being stupid.
Case in point: remember the BLM riots of 2020?
The riots happened because the police are racist. That was a hge problem. Police everywhere were racist. Black people were being killed by police by the thousands every day. Every cop in every city was a racist who had to be stopped from killing innocent civilians.
The elitist-liberal-academicians demand we defund the police. In some cases, disband them. In all case, shame and humiliate them relentlessly.
Now these make-believers can start to imagine a theoretical idea better than police. Except they can’t or they forget about it. Without police, citizens are vulnerable to crime which is starting to become more violent and more prevalent.
Emergency! Our cities are under siege! Crime is out of control! So the make-believers huff and explain, “Tell the cities to stop being racist and figure out how to police better.” They don’t say it out loud, but under their breath, they say, “Idiots! Can’t even figure out how to stop crime!”
How about Biden’s climate policies?
Climate change is going to kill us all in a few years.
Stop using all oil, stop drilling, drain the strategic petroleum reserves. Ban gas stoves and pizza ovens. Mandate electric cars by 2025. No 2030. No 2040. No 2030. Oh, and transition the military to all electric war vehicles.
Start to think about theoretical ways in which one might run the economy without oil. Tell the entrepreneurs to build more electric cars, mandate that everyone purchase them, and then demand every industry reduce its carbon footprint to zero.
Leave it to the people in America to figure out how to run their country without energy. After all, that’s the easy part. It was the initial idea that required genius.
The problem is that this academic approach to problems dominates left-wing politics.
Our schools are failing; we spend more money per student than most developed nations on education and our results are spectacularly mediocre and downright dismal when it comes to math and science. (By the way, we were number 1 in the world in academic achievement until Jimmy Carter invited the academic crowd of make-believers to run the now infamous Department of Education.) Our shortcomings are particularly noticeable when we compare out students to those in China or many other countries that spend far less per student on education. So the leftist-elitist approach is that we should “improve education” and while they are more than happy to throw money at the problem (or at least throw money at the Teachers’ Unions), they have zero solutions. It’s up to the local communities to do the odious grunt work of actually improving the system. What to the make-believers advocate? Higher salaries for teachers, more LGBTQ curricula, closing schools for years for COVID, and, oh, another raise for teachers. They then shove their ideas onto the states and make them figure out how to implement and pay for this stuff. If the states complain, well, the leftists chant, “It’s theoretical, you’re just too stupid to understand it… your job is to just make it happen.”
Good grief, do the elitists have to do everything, people?
Sort of like reparations. Let’s give every descendant of slaves (or every Black person, I can never remember which) $5 million dollars. Who cares if we can’t afford it, it’s theoretical. And who cares if the Black person’s family emigrated here after the Civil War? It’s theoretical. And who cares if the Black person is actually descended from slave traders as well as slaves? (Hint: Kamala Harris). It’s theoretical!
The elitists think cash bail is a bad idea. So they get rid of it and tell communities to figure out how to keep criminals off the street while letting apprehended criminals back out on the street. It’s theoretical. This spirit of this ideologically driven make-believism does harm on so many levels.
The first harm it does is that it destroys functional institutions and functional concepts. True, these institutions and concepts may be flawed, but slow, incremental change is far less destructive than simply destroying the institution and figuring out what to do later. The liberal approach to most problems in America is like a person who burns down his house because he saw some ants in the kitchen … the house is gone, but he knows he will figure out how to rebuild the house even better tomorrow. Or he’ll call the dumb contractor and demand he rebuild the house… this time making it ant-proof. Sure it took half a million dollars and six months time, but at least the ant problem is solved.
It destroys morale.
It mocks the sensible approach of incremental change. Sudden, dramatic change and irrevocable actions are not helpful except in very extreme cases. We should not tear things down until we know how we intend on fixing them.
Finally, you can’t just make up solutions without doing research, finding plausible answer to problems, testing those solutions, and gathering data. Just because you can imagine a tank of plankton generating electricity does not mean it is possible.
Let’s imagine this phony illustrative scenario. An elitist says, “Let’s close every cancer research center. We’ve been doing cancer research for 100 years and we haven’t found the cure yet! Let’s shut down the cancer research centers, and turn the buildings into safe shooting spaces for addicts!”
A normal person might ask, “But how are we going to cure cancer?”
Don’t think the make-believists don’t know. “From now on, we’ll cure cancer by making people who have cancer get a cancer-fighting service dog. That will cure cancer and save a lot of money!” So they close all cancer research, junkies get safe shooting spaces, and cancer patients are mandated to get a cancer-fighting dog. People who object or even ask questions as to how their dog is going to cure cancer are banned from social media, publicly ostracized, and shamed by their families. If a cancer patient is unhappy with his magical cancer-fighting dog, the FBI knocks in their front door at 5 in the morning, and they go to prison, where they learn the IRS will audit them for the last 30 years and they have no right to an accountant. Or a lawyer. Or a jury trial.
When this problem happens too many times, the make-believists start to lose their patience and scream at doctors, “You just better find a way to solve this problem and fast! People are dying! You’re not doing the service-dog campaign right, you stupid jerks! Make it so dogs can cure cancer, you morons!”
The mainstream media (MSM) launches an all-out attack on those anti-service-dog people and those imbecile doctors who aren’t teaching patients how special service dogs can cure cancer. (They are quick to try to cancel and even incarcerate some doctors who allow for patients allergic to dogs to opt out of the program, stating that everybody knows cancer-fighting dogs are the one and only solution!) And forget cancer-fighting cats. The FDA outlaws cat ownership throughout the country for fear that some cancer patients might find relief in a cancer-fighting cat. Cats cannot cure cancer, people, wake up! Certain doctors get fired over their failures to cure cancer with the service dogs. A few who ask questions go to prison. Most who object are cancelled. Meanwhile people die of cancer at unprecedented rates. About four or five years later, they quietly re-open the cancer centers and nobody talks about cancer-fighting service dogs after that. When asked, our liberal friends don’t remember the incident. When they are confronted with proof about the cancer-fighting dog fiasco, they blame it on Donald Trump. “Remember when Donald Trump told doctors that getting a service dog would cure cancer? What an idiot Trump is! It’s hard to believe some people voted for that guy who tried to cure cancer by making people get service dogs!”
It's like the open border. Who among us does not know that an open border is a bad idea? Yet liberals have the make-believer attitude that it is “racist” if you deny a person citizenship in your country if that person is of a non-white race. It may even be racist if you deny a white person admission to this country. Whatever it is, it’s racist not to let every single human into America if they want to come. It’s racist not to give them the free healthcare and free benefits and free housing that we deny to our needy veterans. It’s racist not to give them iPhones and designer handbags. It’s even racist not to house them for free, even if we have to kick aged veterans out of nursing homes and put them on the street to do so.
We have to leave the border wide open. It’s good for the economy, you know. How is it good for the economy? Well, it’s theoretical! Then the liberals turn to the cities and states that are over-run with huge influxes of migrants and inform them loud and clear that these cities have to “solve the problem.” Those stupid yokels better “figure it out!” and pronto. Look at all the Blue State sanctuary city mayors drowning in illegal immigrants—and look how the elitists (who planned all this) are helping them. They’re not. They’re yelling at them. It the mayors’ fault for being so stupid!
After all, in theory, an open border is a wonderful anti-racist thing. “You stupid mouth-breathers better figure out how to deal with this problem that you created by being racists pigs!” they screech at us. And this is the funny part. It doesn’t matter if you’re conservative or liberal, R or D, red or blue … if you are not an academic elitist in the world of make-believe, you’re a garbage person whose only job in life is to make their policies work and then get kicked in the teeth.
True, most of the time, it's up to the dumb people in the flyover states to figure out how to fix these problems, like mass immigration on an unsustainable scale. After all, academics are too smart to deal with actual dirty, smelly people. Elitists are far too smart—they have to fight racism, not figure out how to house five hundred people with no source of income who don’t speak the language and have broken the law to get here.
But now the make-believers are even turning on liberals and Democrats and Blue state governments to fix immigration policy, crime, fentanyl abuse. Why are so many people pooping on the streets of San Francisco that they make a poop app so you can plan a hygienic walking tour? Don’t ask Nancy Pelosi or Gavin Newsom. Ask the street cleaners. Nancy and Gavin just make theoretical policy… it is not up to them to make anything actually work.
It's like giving billions to Iran. Who among us thinks that giving billions to Iran is a good idea? Yet elitists in the land of make-believe think that it is a fine and noble humanitarian thing to help other nations, so they demand that money be poured into Iran like grain down a goose’s neck for foie gras. When we run out of money, the elitist regime will simply print more. After all, “it’s theoretical” and these are reality-optional times. And we know the Iranians will not use the funds for any weaponry, since they promised us they wouldn’t and elitists who do not believe their own countrymen always believe Iran. So, when Iran builds bombs with this money and starts going after our allies in the Middle East, the make-believe elitists will then turn to the military and say, “Fix it, you stupid hillbillies, you’re the soldiers! So start defending the nation! Honestly, do we have to think up all these ideas and do all your work, too?”
It's like illicit fentanyl. Who among us thinks that an open border and the Chinese-Mexican connection with illicit fentanyl is a good idea? But the elitist academic class takes a theoretical approach. They say, “It’s the fault of Big Pharma, we have to police Big Pharma more and tax them.” And they do and illicit fentanyl deaths go up. Illicit fentanyl is not controlled by Big Pharma; Big Pharma doesn’t run the clandestine labs where illicit fentanyl is made. That’s mostly done by cartels in Mexico with precursors from China and India, but elitists have no idea what the cartels even are and they don’t know what a precursor is. So our better class tells physicians and public health services to stop letting people die of illicit fentanyl. They go on media outlets and rampage about the stupid doctors, prescribing illicit fentanyl to homeless people!!!
How about transgender surgery for minors? Who among us thinks that a minor who is not old enough to buy cigarettes or get a tattoo ought to be allowed—even be encouraged—to have sexual reassignment surgery that is permanent, irreversible, and has a high rate of complications? Elitists look down their noses and say in their theoretical voice, “Children will die if we do not immediately perform surgery!” So surgeries are performed. And if some kids still commit suicide or have severe surgical complications or even regret their decision, the elitist make-believe crowd will sneer at the physicians they bullied into performing these surgeries, and they say, “Fix it, you idiotic physicians, trans surgery for kids is a brilliant idea and you’re making a mess of it! Do we have to do everything for you? We already gave you the idea of trans surgery, you make it work!”
When the trans medical-industrial complex starts to get hit with lawsuits for transing impressionable children (and they will, mark my words), the academics will sip their Chardonnay and say, “Pay for that, you stupid doctors and Big Pharma execs! What were you thinking, you morons? We told you not to trans people, you’re just a bunch of idiots! We warned you that trans surgery for minors was a bad idea!” Elitists lie with impunity.
They may even blame Trump. “You know, this whole trans debacle started when Donald Trump mandated trans surgery for kids!” Seriously, one day somebody will say that.
And for parents of children, well, parents are all a bunch of deplorable jerks who do not deserve to raise their own children. Remember how Joe Biden told us that children belonged to “all of us.” He probably meant that children are property of the Teachers’ Union (except when the kids gets the flu or needs money for college, then mom and dad are on deck). “You’re irredeemable and deplorable, and we’ll tell your kids who they are and arrange for a bunch of surgeries. We’ll trans them, then you take care of them! And they better grow up to be happy, healthy, with no complications, or it’s your fault!”
In liberal-elitist land of make-believe, electrical energy can be generated by a shoe box full of unicorn farts. Everyone is happy eating big juicy maggot sandwiches. Everybody gets vaccinated once a month, no matter what. Schools are places of trans ideology rather than learning, and crime does not exist because elitists have redefined crime as what happens to them, not what happens to you. Just like democracy has been redefined. Democracy is when you vote and speak and think and act exactly as elitists tell you. Nobody needs math anymore, illicit fentanyl is legal and free, and everyone is racist except, of course, the old white people in the elitist class.