It looks like Rand Paul's campaign advisers have requested he dumb it down a few more notches, lest he be considered too highbrow for the sort of raving lunatics that tend to turn out to vote in the first Republican primaries. He'll be attaching himself to the
edjucation is skary movement.
“I refuse to accept that our nation’s colleges will always remain bastions of left-wing extremism. I refuse to allow leftists to brainwash an entire generation of American students into hating our country and our free-market system,” Mr. Paul wrote in an email blasted out Tuesday on behalf of the Arlington-based Leadership Institute.
Mr. Paul goes on to write that he’s joining with the group “to help liberate our nation’s colleges and universities from the clutches of the left.”
Ah, the secret liberal conspiracy to be liberal at America's youth, teaching them arts and sciences and indoctrinating their young minds with all the secret liberalism that Maxwell's equations or a nuanced understanding of mitosis can impart. The notion that the nation's colleges and universities have been working toward imposing a sort of educational sharia has been in vogue since long before the current generation of Fox News watchers learned that "sharia" was a word, regularly propped up by one ideological nutcase or another who has convinced themselves that their own presented theories on why people with black skin are inferior or why James Madison would have thought such-and-such or why climate change is
shut up have not been more widely accepted not because their work was shoddy or their "proofs" tendentious but because of a global liberal science-knowing conspiracy against
them, personally, to keep these great conservative truths from being more widely known.
It plays well to the base, though. The idea that book-learners in their ivory towers think they're better than you, or even just the notion that someone who has devoted their entire adult lives to the particulars of one niche of human understanding probably knows more about that topic than you and your Innate Conservative Grasp of All Things can muster, grates horribly on a certain segment of the population. Anti-intellectualism is alive and very, very well in America today, and apparently Rand Paul has appointed himself its champion.