THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

No, Virginia, it isn't the Communist Plot or Secret Evil Geniuses that who invent and push the leftist nonsense. The Soviet Union is gone, and the disastrous nonsense keeps coming.

Most of today's horrible ideas begin with professors on campuses in the West. Ideas that the left likes are invented or at least developed among social science professors. From time to time, one of those professors floats an idea that sells like hotcakes on campus.

It spreads from there.

For example, American academics and the media and yuppies and Europeans used to sell socialism as the Wave of the Future.

Socialism said that the government had to take over the entire economy and turn it over to the bureaucrats who were trained by professors. The "intellectuals" would rule in the Inevitable Socialist Future.

But different forms of socialism killed at least a hundred million people in the twentieth century. Socialist failure in the Third World and in Communist countries kept most of the world in poverty. See September 30, 2000, THE KEY TO PROSPERITY: DON'T BE A DUMBASS and OUR IMMIGRATION POLICY SAYS THAT MONEY IS MADE BY MAGIC. And June 17, 2000 -- KINKY SEX, AGAIN.

Real socialism has been discredited at incredible cost, over and over, until even Communists now admit it's silly.

That was a disaster for the left. Intellectuals and radical students and the media and yuppies used to say that bureaucrats must run American life because Socialism was the Wave of the Future. It was also Accepted European Opinion.

Now another idea was needed to make an argument for bureaucratic rule.

Soon it became a popular idea on campus that bureaucrats should run all aspects of American life, not for socialism, but in the name of Saving the Environment. This was not a plot, it was a natural development.

Social science professors on Western campuses run what amounts to a Liberal Seminary. They teach leftism, and they try to formulate leftist ideas that will sell. After Socialism As the Wave of the Future died, they tried many new excuses for bureaucratic (aka Intellectual) rule.

Finally, the Environment excuse sold like wildfire among students. So Environmentalism as an excuse for Intellectual Rule went out by the usual leftist route: It was first tried out on 1) leftist students. When it sold there, it naturally it spread 2) to the media. The media sold it 3) to leftist Yuppies.

Europeans bought Bureaucrats Must Rule To Save The Environment from what they considered the American Intelligentsia. Only then did it become Accepted European Opinion.

The idea that led to the Kyoto Treaty started on American campuses, spread by the routine leftist route, and is now Idealism, Intellectualism, and Accepted European Opinion.

Other policy disasters became Accepted European Opinion by the same route.

The idea that Criminals Are Just Victims Who Need Lots of Social Programs To Save Them followed exactly the same route. It sold on campus, so it sold to the media, so it sold to yuppies, so Europe swallowed it whole.

Academics changed clean air from a legitimate concern to an overboard leftist excuse for bureaucratic rule. They changed the idea that even criminals have rights to a giant leftist world view that was a disaster. They changed education to leftist indoctrination. None of this is accidental.

Academia tells us openly that it is dedicated to the leftist agenda. They openly suppress all real dissent from that agenda.

And we pay them to do it.