Campaign Aftermath: a University President Speaks

The presidential election of 2016 produced results which were a surprise, if not to everyone, then at least to many observers. Many African-American voters, Latino voters, and female voters chose not to vote for Hillary Clinton, and thereby handed the victory to President Trump.

On many university campuses, a vocal segment of the student body could not understand how Trump’s presidency would eventually benefit not only college-age citizens, but average citizens from all social classes, races, and ethnicities.

President Trump came into office, after all, due to millions of African-American and Latino voters who chose not to vote for Hillary.

Yet universities, often hailed as centers of free speech and free thought, became quite hostile to anyone who admitted to having supported Trump’s candidacy. Students who were even suspected of voting for Trump were bullied.

At the University of Michigan, at a meeting of the campus senate, university president Mark Schlissel pointed out that saturation of socialist viewpoints had removed both faculty and students from an accurate assessment of reality:

I would argue no matter how [the election] turned out, our community has an awful lot of work to do to try to understand the forces at play in our society and how we've ended up with such large degrees of polarization. Why was this a surprising result in Ann Arbor and not a surprising result in other communities around our nation? I think as an academic community, we have to ask whether we're really in touch with the full breadth of the society we're serving and how they're thinking and what's important to them. Do we have in our student body, on our faculty, and adequate breadth of diversity of thought?

Because students and faculty had been living with an illusion, the election presented a moment of disillusionment. Having silenced the viewpoints of ordinary citizens on campus, the university was surprised when those same viewpoints made themselves felt off campus - at the ballot box.

The rage of the campus socialists vented itself on the hapless Trump supporters, who merely wanted freedom of speech. Mark Schlissel, speaking of students who voted for Trump, noted that

They feel marginalized. This is a challenge for the community and they need to feel included and involved in the discussion. Their opinions need to be considered and discussed as opposed to marginalized. We need to try, I think, to have ideas included in our community for discussion that are more representative of the ideas in the world at-large as compared to the academic part of the world at-large. I think that's a way to understand what is happening in modern society – here and globally.

As the post-election lunacy accelerated, leftist students began fabricating fake “hate crimes,” and to claim that these crimes were perpetrated by Trump supporters. A woman wearing a hijab claimed that she had been assaulted.

The National Review reports that, after investigating, “Ann Arbor police lieutenant Matthew Lige” announced that the woman had filed a false police report, and that no “ethnic intimidation” or any other form of assault had occurred. Indeed, video surveillance records showed that the entire incident was a fiction.

Faked “hate crimes” are nothing new. For more than a decade, individuals hoping to identify themselves as victims have falsified evidence and filed false police reports. Such fraud reveals that the very people who want to be seen as “victims” are, in fact, the oppressors and aggressors.

The bullying, intimidation, and harassment of Trump supporters on campus is merely the latest instance of such deception.

What Makes History Tick

In any narrative about events past or present, the reader wants to know: what was planned and intentional, and what was mere coincidence?

The answer is that much which seems coincidental was in fact planned.

Was it mere coincidence that the Japanese military launched a surprise attack on the United States on a Sunday? No; the Japanese officers were well aware of which day of the week might offer the best chances of catching the military defenses at a low level of alertness.

Was it mere coincidence that President Lincoln was assassinated at the precise moment that an actor onstage delivered a comic line in a play which the president was attending? No; the assassin had planned to kill the president on cue.

If we look at other events, then we can begin to see the effects of a grand conspiracy. Problems facing society endure despite actions taken to address those problems. Perhaps the actions are deliberately ineffective: someone benefits from the duration of various forms of social misery.

In domestic matters, the persistence of inner city poverty not only withstands governmental efforts to alleviate it, but it thrives on those efforts. Poverty is intensified by government programs designed, or allegedly designed, to end it.

The main causes of poverty are government programs intended to end poverty - or at least, programs presenting themselves as having such intentions.

In foreign policy, relations with our true and natural allies are damaged or soured by unwitting gaffes by diplomats. But were those blunders so accidental? Was there not a larger plan designed to weaken the international status of the United States?

Likewise, actions that inadvertently help our enemies seem to be the State Department’s miscalculations, but are in fact quite calculated and in no way inadvertent.

Not all of history is determined by conspiracies, but much of it is. As historian Gary Allen notes, “Because the Establishment controls the media, anyone exposing the” the national and international conspiracies

will be the recipient of a continuous fusillade of invective from newspapers, magazines, TV and radio. In this manner one is threatened with loss of “social respectability” if he dares broach the idea that there is organization behind any of the problems currently wracking America. Unfortunately, for many people social status comes before intellectual honesty. Although they would never admit it, social position is more important to many people than is the survival of freedom in America.

Large conspiracies bring together actors of opposite and seemingly incompatible categories. Conspiracies often escape detection because it would not occur to many observers that a capitalist and communist would work together.

In secret, however, there is collusion between members of the international communist conspiracy and certain key figures in the financial and monetary systems of industrialized nations. The unlikeliness of this combination is its camouflage.

Of the several levels of deception at work here, one of them is linguistic: the communist conspiracy is not about achieving of some socialist worker’s utopia in which every laborer receives the same pay as his manager. The word ‘communist’ is robbed of its original meaning, and used as an excuse to obtain and maintain power over governmental and economic systems.

Likewise, members of the conspiracy who seem to represent ‘business’ or ‘capitalism’ do not, in fact, have a devotion to the concept of the free market or of property rights, and thus the words are again used inaccurately to disguise a naked grab for power.

A far-flung and wide-ranging conspiracy is, and has been, at work in many different events and trends which threaten to weaken the United States. A network of individuals and groups from an incredibly diverse spectrum of institutions strive in concert to damage the freedom which is the foundational identity of the nation.

Thus seemingly incompatible combinations appear: billionaire investors and slum-dwelling rioters; leftist politicians and bankers.

It is incumbent upon those who value freedom to continue to uncover and expose conspiracies. The alternative, however it may be named, is a form of slavery.