Hillsdale College: The Great American Leftist Reform Machine?

We take it for granted, sadly, that the likes of RFK Jr. and Wolf would never be invited to speak at your average state-funded university with a strong liberal arts “humanities” faculty.

They go to Hillsdale because it’s one of the only places they are allowed to speak truth about who really runs the U.S. state and for what purposes.

In the end, it’s Hillsdale’s gain. The only thing propping up their competitors, mainstream universities, is state funding. All of their popularity and respect among average people has been totally squandered at this point. What was once the envy of the world — America’s higher education system — is now the butt of jokes.

We — as in people of America and the West more broadly — desperately need this kind of popular escape valve for people who identify themselves as on the left out of liberal politics to show that there is something outside of that paradigm if they will just turn to the light and reject darkness.

As long as people run politics (that is, until AI steps in and relieves humans of the burden of governance) the psychological reality, for better or worse, is that humans are inherently tribalistic.

There is something ingrained in our worldview that facilitates an “us vs. them” adversarial mindset. Chalk it up to an evolutionary relic. We define ourselves, in many ways, by opposition to our enemies. If no natural enemies are found in the environment, we have an amazing capacity to invent them.

Consider the perspective of a leftist — a lifelong leftist at that, as ideological disposition is often an inherited trait — watching the COVID drama unfold in 2020:

You’ve been conditioned with a well-advised skepticism of Big Pharma your whole life. Multinational pharmaceutical corporations don’t get any more ruthless and downright immoral (consider when Bayer “knowingly sold blood-clotting agents infected with HIV to Asia and Latin America months after withdrawing them from Europe and the U.S.“).

Now, you are admonished not only not to oppose Big Pharma, but to celebrate it.

Maybe you meekly raise the issue with friends or family who also belong to the neoliberal cult. You are promptly smacked down, accused of propagating conspiracy theories.

Your workplace informs you that to keep your position you’ll need to get injected. Perhaps you know that every other vaccine in history has taken 10-15 years to develop due to safety precautions but that the COVID-19 shots were developed and taken to market in less than one.

But you need the money, and you have face to save with the neoliberal cult members all around you. This is your entire livelihood and social support system on the line.

So you say nothing and comply.

The consensus of your comrades, amplified by the corporate media, is that “anti-masker,” “anti-vaxxer” MAGA domestic terrorists are the reason the pandemic rages.

Even raising the question about whether Donald Trump and his band of domestic terrorists are actually responsible for the pandemic and not, say, Anthony Fauci, who funded the gain-of-function research in Wuhan that likely caused it in the first place, is forbidden.

So you never challenge the narrative head-on.

Getting ejected into the world on your own, separated from a base of support based on tribal loyalty, is a terrifying proposition save for the bravest personalities.

Then imagine that you see other formerly deeply respected members of your tribe, like Naomi Wolf or RFK Jr., break the mold and bravely challenge the illegitimate and corrupt agenda of their own former party.

Courage is contagious. For the first time, you see in another member of your tribe the possibility of defection based on moral principles. So you jump ship and take as many other people with you as you can, potentially creating a snowball effect.

Maybe this is overly optimistic and RFK and Wolf’s embrace by Hillsdale College won’t actually create such an appreciable ripple effect within the left. But it might.