The New Year is upon us. 2023 went by quickly, and I am still searching for a New Year’s resolution. It is hard to believe that it has been just a year since my last resolution and my failure to become a better person.
There are three main takeaways from 2023.
Higher education, especially among the Ivy Leagues and other “elite” colleges, continues to be revealed for what it has become: a bloated, tenured-protected and indoctrinating mess. Three Ivy League college presidents recently went before Congress and gave arrogant and evasive answers to simple questions.
Colleges have morphed from institutes for learning into indoctrination camps designed to propagate leftist race and gender ideology. The worst extremes of the left have now become the norm at colleges, which are out of touch, expensive and arrogant. They used to be places that searched for the truth; now they create false narratives.
Colleges are so paralyzed by race that they cannot fire the plagiarizing president of Harvard, Dr. Claudine Gay. So far, 40 cases of plagiarism have suddenly been discovered after she angered Jewish people, something any educated person with common sense knows not to do. President Gay, who is Black, implies the assertions are racial. She says she plans to address all this in her upcoming “I Have a Dream” speech on the National Mall in D.C.
Having coddled students for so long, businesses are no longer buying the colleges’ product: students. I am glad I got my degree in gender studies in the ’80s, back when there were only two of them.
Colleges have become so PC and humorless that their choosing to become antisemitic should worry us. I would not bring Mel Brooks’ comedy “The Producers” to any Ivy League campus for fear the audience would not laugh at the “Springtime for Hitler” song, but instead join in.
Secondly, it was good to see America and candidates (mostly Republicans like Vivek Ramaswamy and Ron DeSantis) push back on the idea of Washington getting us into another war of choice. Biden and the Beltway permanent political class love war now. And to keep us funding his honey hole ATM (Ukraine), Biden pandered to students by pretending he could wipe out their student loans.
The loans that college students signed up for to get degrees are worthless, like the course/major called “Taylor Swift Studies.” Getting out of college is much like breaking up with Taylor Swift; in a year or so, you will be paying a severe price.
Lastly, women and men taking advantage of the #MeToo movement have been dealt a blow. Kevin Spacey, Johnny Depp and others with the guts to challenge old claims have won their cases.
When the #MeToo movement took the fun out of being a Democrat in elected office, the left backed off. They certainly have kept the Epstein Island guest list under wraps. It is still the only secret in D.C.
Opportunists used the #MeToo trend to shake down the rich and famous for alleged sexual encounters from decades ago. When egregious crimes like rape, sexual assault and pedophilia go unpunished because people use the heightened #MeToo attention to threaten criminal charges to enhance their civil suit shakedowns, we are all worse off. It’s gotten where it is a career risk being social with co-workers.
In short, not a single Founding Father or president would have survived this #MeToo movement. Not a single male Republican Supreme Court nominee since 2016 has not been attacked by an old allegation. Rest assured, if Lee Harvey Oswald’s bullet had not gotten JFK in 1963, the #MeToo movement in 2018 would have killed him at the ripe old age of 101.
Contact Ron Hart, a syndicated op-ed satirist, author and TV/radio commentator, at Ron@RonaldHart.com or @RonaldHart on X (formerly Twitter).