INCIVILITY AND ITS CAUSES – QUOTE OF THE DAY – AT 1:12 P.M. ET:  There is much whining about the state of civility in the United States.  Naturally, the media never blames itself for incivility, and certainly never blames its feeder system, the colleges and universities.  The great Walter Williams begs to differ.  From dailywire.com: 

Much of today's incivility and contempt for personal liberty has its roots on college campuses, and most of the uncivil and contemptuous are people with college backgrounds…

...A recent Brookings Institution poll found that nearly half of college students believe that hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment. That's nonsense; it is. Fifty-one percent of college students think they have a right to shout down a speaker with whom they disagree. Nineteen percent of students think that it's acceptable to use violence to prevent a speaker from speaking. Over 50 percent agree that colleges should prohibit speech and viewpoints that might offend certain people. One shouldn't be surprised at all if these visions are taught and held by many of their professors. Colleges once taught and promoted an understanding of Western culture. Today many professors and the college bureaucracy teach students that they're victims of Western culture and values.

Benjamin Franklin wrote, "Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation, must begin by subduing the Freeness of Speech." Much later, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said, "Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime." From the Nazis to Stalinists to Maoists, tyrants have always started out supporting free speech, just as American leftists did during the 1960s. Their support for free speech is easy to understand. Speech is vital for the realization of their goals of command, control and confiscation. The right to say what they please is their tool for indoctrination, propagandizing and proselytization. Once the leftists gain control, as they have at many universities, free speech becomes a liability and must be suppressed. This is increasingly the case on university campuses. Much of the off-campus incivility we see today is the fruit of what a college education has done to our youth.

COMMENT:  Very well said.  We must stop thinking of education as a guaranteed positive good.  In fact, all over the world students are taught the worst ideas.  And in our country, as Walter Williams indicates, students are too often taught that the very civilization that gives them their freedoms is in fact their oppressor.

We have sent too many students to college without asking what was being taught, and who was doing the teaching.  That failure to ask may be fatal. 

November 25,  2018