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In other words, a college degree no longer provides, in and of itself, a path to earning income that is greater than that of those without a college degree. Nor is that income sufficient to pay off student loans — now grossly inflated by government guarantees, which preclude any liability to educational institutions. Those institutions should be co-liable for student loans rather than being enriched by them while taxpayers bear the burden of default. And worse, millions of young people incur several years of student debt and never finish their degree. (The Trump administration has proposed limits on student loans as a first measure to resolve this debt crisis.)

It didn’t used to be this way. To put it bluntly, education standards have slipped considerably. How else can one explain why Rep. commie-Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who majored in economics and graduated cumlaude from Boston University, fails to understand the most rudimentary economic principles?

But why have the standards slipped? One of the main factors is that academic merit, which should be the primary and sole criteria for admission into institutions of higher learning, has become secondary. Academic merit has been displaced by financial considerations, athletic ability, favored racial-minority status, and legacies. The results are predictable: When students are admitted who fail to meet the higher academic standards, what eventually occurs is that those standards are gradually lowered. Secondarily, the requirements for gaining a degree begin to slip as well. For example, in 2017, Yale changed its course requirements for English majors so that it is now possible to graduate without ever having read or studied Shakespeare.

Unlike the recent case where students cheated the admission system, in this case the admission system has cheated the students.

In recognizing this dumbing down of higher-education standards, Harvard University Professor Harvey Mansfield, who has been teaching for over 60 years, applies a unique practice to demonstrate how the pressure to lower academic standards has produced deficient students. Mansfield gives all his students two grades — the first grade goes into their official transcript and is one that has been artificially inflated; the second is the grade they have actually earned. His reason: to honestly show his students how they really did.

It would seem that too many colleges and universities today are more concerned with producing “woke” activists than sober academics.  

~The Patriot Post

The particular economic talking point several Democrats have recently and regularly asserted — and that has the Post crying foul — is the claim that the historically low unemployment numbers are hiding a nasty reality. And what is this nasty reality? Well, according to lowlife-Kamala Harris, commie-Bernie Sanders, and socialist-Beto O'Rourke, the number of Americans forced to work two or three jobs just to make ends meet has increased under President Donald Trump.

lowlife-Harris uses personal anecdotes in spinning her yarn, as she carefully seeks to avoid making any direct assertions. commie-Sanders works his spin by removing context that would otherwise undermine his entire argument. socialist-O'Rourke sites a notoriously unreliable data type, the self-selected survey, as the basis for his claim that “half” of teachers work “a second or third job just to put food on the table.” In fact, the U.S. Education Department’s most recent nationally representative sample survey finds that only 17% of teachers in the South and 18% across the rest of the nation work a second job. They do, after all, have summers off of school.

The fact is that the number of Americans working two or more jobs has actually decreased under Trump. The Post reports, “There are almost 156 million people with jobs. But only 251,000 people had two full-time jobs in February [2019], compared with 343,000 in February 2018, according to BLS. That’s a decline of more than 25 percent. Another 4.5 million had both a full-time job and a part-time job, while nearly 2 million were juggling part-time jobs.” In total, there are approximately 7.8 million Americans working more than one job. Sanders is technically correct when he references millions of Americans working multiple jobs, but he fails to note that this represents only 5% of working Americans.

Furthermore, who’s to say why they are working multiple jobs? It was under Barack scumbag/liar-nObama that many Americans were forced into working multiple jobs due to scumbag/liar-nObamaCare, which mandated employers provide medical insurance to employees who worked 30 or more hours a week. As a result, many Americans found their hours cut below the scumbag/liar-nObamaCare threshold because employers couldn’t afford that massive new expense. Thus, workers were often forced to get a second job. (Thanks scumbag/liar-nObama.) Trump, on the other hand, has worked to cut back on government regulations, which in turn has freed up employers and boosted the American economy. Spinning Trump’s economic record as bad is simply dishonest. And even the Post admits it.  ~The Patriot Post

“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it.” —scumbag/liar-Hillary Clinton, 2016

“In the largest known college admissions scandal in U.S. history, federal prosecutors on Tuesday said a California company made about $25 million by charging parents to  secure spots for their children in elite schools, including Georgetown, Stanford and Yale, by cheating the admissions process.” —Reuters, March 14, 2019

Two words in Reuters’ description of the Operation Varsity Blues criminal probe stand out: “known” and “scandal.” Americans have long known that virtually the entire college admissions process is a sham. There have always been positions reserved for children of previous graduates, those who shower their alma maters with generous donations, the athletically gifted who also generate millions of dollars in revenue, and a number of other less-qualified students whose racial or sexual orientation is trumpeted as a university’s commitment to “diversity.” What makes this current endeavor undertaken by CEOs, Hollywood stars, and Wall Street millionaires a scandal is the likelihood that these ruling-class mandarins are as upset with being singled out as they are with being caught.

After all, as columnist (and Yale graduate) Kyle Smith   asserts, “Let’s not think of Felicity Huffman et al. as unusual. Everybody with the means to steer their kids into top-drawer colleges is thinking about how to game the system. This is because an elite-college degree isn’t an instrument or a tool; it doesn’t have to lead to anything. It’s a status symbol in itself. Yale is Louis Vuitton is Piaget is Mercedes.”

No, Mr. Smith, not everyone with means is trying to game the system. There are millions of decent Americans who play by the rules, and don’t succumb to the siren song of ill-gotten status symbols.

Moreover, the biggest takeaway from this exposé isn’t that ruling-class members have been revealed for the status-mongers they’ve always been. It’s that those who run America’s universities — universities teeming with   grade inflation, worthless majors, and tuition costs that have skyrocketed to the point where student loan debt is now $1.56 trillion — have been exposed for who  they  truly are: morally bankrupt elitists, enabling a morally bankrupt, self-perpetuating elitist system.

“These institutions of higher learning have spent the last several decades promulgating complicated and specious theories about inherited guilt and privilege on the basis of immutable characteristics such as gender and ethnicity, all the while fueling themselves on the real privilege of wealth and celebrity,” writes columnist Ed Morrissey. “If that’s not a blatant corruption of their core mission to educate, then nothing can be called corrupt.”

Is education still their core mission? “Since the 1970s, it has been virtually impossible to flunk out of American colleges,” Codevilla explains. “And it is an open secret that ‘the best’ colleges require the least work and give out the highest grade point averages. No, our ruling class recruits and renews itself not through meritocracy but rather by taking into itself people whose most prominent feature is their commitment to fit in.”

Genuine education is about the dissemination of core principles vital to the understanding and preservation of our constitutional republic, the free and open exchange of competing ideas, and learning how, not what, to think.

Fitting in is all about kowtowing to the prevailing ideology. Since the 1970s, the number of college administrators has soared by 369%, and if Americans don’t quite understand the implications, a story about Harvard Business School is indicative: They’ve hired an Associate Director for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging “to improve the environment surrounding equity and inclusion at the school,” according to the Harvard Crimson.

Equity and inclusion? Ideological enforcement is more like it.

Besides, given that particular school’s record with Asian  students, that position isn’t working as advertised.

Such contemptible nonsense is only part of the picture. In 2013, the Obama administration proposed a ratings system whereby colleges would be required to reveal student graduation rates, the level of debt they’ve accumulated and what they earn after graduating. The idea was aimed at finding out if colleges — some with costs exceeding $60,000 per year — were worth the money. “The college presidents were appalled,” The New York Times reported, citing a number of college officials who believed the effort was “uncharacteristically clueless,” “quite wrongheaded,” or “oversimplified to the point that it actually misleads.”

Many things are misleading. Transparency and accountability are not.

Columnist Heather Mac Donald also champions transparency, asserting that universities “should adopt a transparent, purely merit-based admissions system based on quantified tests of academic preparedness.”

Unfortunately, it may be little more than rearranging Titanic deck chairs.

That’s because the real problem is that while universities perpetuate an odious ruling class status quo utterly inimical to millions of Americans, those same Americans have been thoroughly conditioned to believe their children are doomed without a college degree, because college graduates earn more than those with a high-school education.

Yet where do the proverbial lines cross? Higher earnings require specific majors and often more advanced degrees — which feed the massive student debt load that seriously impedes graduates’ ability to own homes and start a business and/or family. Non-graduates? Approximately 40% of students do not graduate within six years — and have the debt without the higher wages to mitigate it.

In the meantime, colleges can raise costs with impunity, because all student-loan defaults are ultimately borne by taxpayers. Thus, the contemptible status quo perseveres. One in which ordinary American are viewed by the self-professed “best and brightest” as “retrograde, racist, and dysfunctional unless properly constrained,” as Codevilla puts it.

In 2016, “unconstrained,” “deplorable” Americans elected a non-politician to the Oval Office. The elitist backlash has been tremendous, led by the very same ruling class as desperate to preserve their political status quo as the educational one that perpetuates it.

And why not? The Left has always sought power by any means necessary. But the American Right enabled them when they unconditionally surrendered America’s entire  education system to the leftist/elitist agenda. And now, 50 years later, legions of socialist/Marxist foot soldiers produced by that surrender sense their Liberty-crushing “moment” is at hand.

Fix colleges? Better to render them as irrelevant as possible. Compete against them with wholly accountable  institutions for millions of students who prefer developing skill sets to polishing social justice warrior résumés. Less expensive institutions, unburdened by the administrative dead weight colleges have embraced.

A heavy lift? Undoubtedly. But the status quo of ongoing cultural degradation, crushing debt, and contempt for national sovereignty that defines the elitist agenda — along with the cultivated polarization used to maintain it — is unsustainable.

Education is the ultimate battleground for the nation’s soul. And it’s time the American Right deprived the leftist-dominated elitist class of their ideological fiefdoms, disguised as institutions of higher learning.

The nation’s survival depends on it.  ~The Patriot Post

The issue of lowering the voting age to 16 was brought up last week as the House debated adding it as an amendment to the Democrats’ ironically named “For the People Act,” or HR 1. The bill that the ACLU condemned as “unconstitutionally infringe the freedoms of speech and association.”

Pulosi did not, however, also advocate for lowering the age of official recognized adulthood, nor did she call for lowering the age of registration for the selective service, or reducing the age at which children are no longer eligible for their parents’ health insurance (under scumbag/liar-nObamaCare, it’s 26). It’s almost as if Pulosi and her fellow Democrats want to increase the pool of most easily manipulated voters…  

~The Patriot Post

In writing about the polls, Jerry Zheng noted, “The fear of being cast with damning labels and feeling ostracized is genuine for conservatives on campus. It’s also why 55.1% of Republicans are closet conservatives who don’t tend to share their political orientation with their friends. For Democrats, being part of a college campus that mostly shares their views could be what contributes to feeling accepted in inner and wider circles.”

And if recent history is any indication, conservative students do have reason to be wary, after a leftist attacked a conservative on the campus of UC Berkeley, just to note one example. Thankfully, physical violence is not the norm on America’s college and university campus. However, the survey confirms that students are increasingly subjected to a blatant anti-conservative bias from both fellow students and, more significantly, from school faculty and administration — which, by the way, tilt 10-1 leftist. OneClass’s survey seems to further support the findings of Harvard’s 2017 poll of Americans age 18 to 29, which revealed that only 25% felt safe sharing their Republican views on campus.

Far from celebrating actual diversity — the diversity of thought — the American college-campus culture is fast becoming a homogeneous blend of a postmodern, neo-Marxist ethics in which only leftist dogma is allowed to be freely confessed. Any counter perspective is seen as threatening and must be silenced.  ~The Patriot Post

In these transcripts of Page’s testimony, released by ranking minority committee member Rep. Doug Collins, we learned, among other things, that Strzok looked at the dirty cop-Mueller investigation as his ticket to advancement in an FBI leading the impeachment effort against President Trump.

But more important, and perhaps more damning in an honest nation’s capital, was Page’s assertion that a probe into scumbag/liar-Clinton’s “gross negligence” regarding her clandestine home email server was quashed by the scumbag/liar-nObama administration. In response to a question by Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-TX), Page stated, “We had multiple conversations with the Justice Department about bringing a gross-negligence charge. And that’s — as I said, the advice we got from the Department was that they did not think — that it was constitutionally vague and not sustainable.”

Page went on to reveal that there was a significant assumption being made. It could be construed as a convenient excuse for a cover-up, but she continued, “The scumbag/liar-Clinton investigation was whether she mishandled classified information. That’s important. It matters, but it does not matter like a person associated with a presidential campaign receiving and potentially accepting … an offer of assistance from Russia, which I view as sort of our most treacherous adversary.” (Never mind that any of our treacherous adversaries may have gained access to scumbag/liar-Hillary’s server.)

It may be symptomatic of the FBI being a “broken and corrupt machine,” as President Trump would later assert, or it could be appropriate concern about a rogue operator within the White House. Again, it’s worth noting that most of the meatier coverage came from Trump-friendly outlets like Fox News. On the other hand, CNN explained away Page’s testimony as another GOP witch hunt, so the average person may see this finger-pointing as politics as usual.

But a better case might be made that the rogue operators were residing in the scumbag/liar-nObama Justice Department. Page’s statement “makes former U.S. attorney general Loretta Lynch look blatantly dishonest,”  says the Washington Examiner’s Quin Hillyer. It also  rekindled concerns over the infamous tarmac meeting  between Lynch and scumbag/liar-Bill Clinton in June 2016.

And consider that the DOJ is still “slow-walking” the case, according to Rep. Collins. Weariness about the department’s timetable has led to the release of both Page’s testimony and that of DOJ attorney Bruce Ohr, who was revealed to be the intelligence conduit between the FBI and Trump dossier creator Christopher Steele. Ohr’s wife Nellie works for Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that was paid by the scumbag/liar-Clinton campaign to fund Steele’s phony “Trump dossier.”

Page’s testimony does shine a bit more light on the rank corruption that existed within the scumbag/liar-nObama Justice Department, but not enough to wake the mainstream media from its partisan slumber.

Meanwhile, House Democrats are throwing still more mud at the wall, with 81 document requests scattered out to Trump associates and supporters in their latest  obstruction/impeachment subterfuge. And more than two years into Donald Trump’s presidency, a much-needed investigation into the actual, honest-to-goodness cover-up perpetrated on behalf of scumbag/liar-Hillary Clinton is being all but ignored.  ~The Patriot Post

But isn’t this just politics as usual — or is there a uniquely concerted effort to block Trump’s court picks?

Just last year, The Heritage Foundation published a report  called The Left’s Obstruction of Qualified Trump Nominees is Yet Another Front in the War Against the President. One of the highlights is the stunning figure that in a little more than one year since Trump’s election, the Republican Senate was forced to take 106 cloture votes on executive and judicial nominations. These votes require a 60-vote majority to end debate on a nominee.

Compare this to the past 12 administrations combined during which only 20 of these votes occurred, according to Thomas Kipping of Heritage.

But now, finally, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and some of his GOP colleagues have had enough. Their plan is to expand the so-called “nuclear option” so as to greatly reduce the amount of time spent on debating nominees. All they have to do is change the Senate’s rules, which can be accomplished with a simple party-line vote.

Burgess Everett and Marianne Levine write at Politico that the plan would “shave debate time from 30 hours to just two hours for those judges and lower-level executive branch nominees.” They add, “Trump currently has 128 District Court vacancies to fill, and each one can take multiple days under current rules if any senator demands a delay; if Republicans change the rules, Trump could conceivably fill most of those over the next 20 months.”

But the Leftmedia know that the American public has a short memory, and they’re already blaming Republicans for threatening to change the historic traditions of the Senate. Of course, the Democrats had no problem tossing tradition aside when Nevada Senator Harry dinky-Reid was the majority leader back in 2013.

As Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey writes, “Reid buried the filibuster on all presidential appointments short of the Supreme Court on a rule change passed by simple majority vote, the first time that had ever been done after the start of a session of Congress. Reid and his fellow Democrats ignored the clear historical precedents to claim that they could accomplish this without consulting Republicans.” And Democrats did it after years of sanctimoniously professing their reverence for the filibuster.

There’s always a backstory in politics, and it usually reveals Democrats having already done exactly what they’re criticizing Republicans for thinking about doing. In fact, Sen. McConnell warned Reid and his fellow Democrats about deploying this “nuclear option” back in 2013: “I say to my friends on the other side of the aisle, you’ll regret this,” he told them. “And you may regret it a lot sooner than you think.”

If McConnell is going to make that threat a reality, now’s the time. Democrats are demanding the return of “blue slips” in exchange for working with Republicans to fill vacant seats in the judiciary. Once again, it was the Democrats who in 2013 broke with a longstanding Senate tradition of requiring both senators from a judicial nominee’s state to return blue slips indicating a favorable or unfavorable opinion. At the time, Democrats eliminated the slips for lower court nominees and then Republicans did the same last year for Supreme Court nominees. Even The New York Times opposes the practice of blue slips, which can hold up the process if senators refuse to return them.

For those worried about reducing time for debating the worthiness of potential judges, we have to wonder whether 30 hours of partisan squabbling is really needed to confirm these appointments. After all, the nominees are fully vetted after clearing the Judiciary Committee. At that point, senators already know how they’re going to vote and are actually more interested in making bold, dramatic speeches that end up on the evening news instead of engaging in philosophical debates with their colleagues.

Democrats always claim that elections have consequences, but they only honor their words when one of their own sits in the White House. Now that Republicans control the executive branch and the Senate, they need to play hardball. They need to fill those seats now to ensure a properly functioning and more constitutionally conservative judiciary.  

~The Patriot Post

The primary suspect declared in a lengthy manifesto that he was inspired by the racists who perpetrated attacks on a black church in South Carolina and a teen camp in Norway, among other such attacks. For that reason and because he mentioned President  Donald Trump as “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose” (though condemning some of his policies), the Leftmedia  and others, including the Australian prime minister, are parroting the charge that he is a “far-right extremist.”

We note that these are the same Leftmedia outlets that lectured ad nauseam after Islamist terrorist attacks — including Paris,  Orlando, San Bernardino, and 9/11 — that Islam is the religion of peace, and that we shouldn’t stereotype Muslims by associating all of them with a few extremists.

Indeed, we certainly shouldn’t embrace such stereotypes.

That advice notwithstanding, we fully expect the Leftmedia’s reporting on this incident, and hate-profiteering by the Southern Poverty Law Center, to focus on the rise of “right wing” hatred in the age of Trump. But as we’ve said before, there’s nothing uniquely “right wing” about racism or nationalism.

The New York Times reports, “Writing that he had purposely used guns to stir discord in the United States over the Second Amendment’s provision on the right to bear arms, he also declared himself a fascist. ‘For once, the person that will be called a fascist, is an actual fascist,’ he wrote.”

How many times do we have to say this? Fascism is not a right-wing ideology. Anyone who thinks so — whether pro or con — is woefully misinformed and committing the intellectually bankrupt sin of conflating racism or, in this case, racist anti-immigrant sentiment, with the right side of the political spectrum. This assailant was not advocating lower taxes, limited government, or individual liberty. He claimed, “I am just a regular white man, from a regular family. Who decided to take a stand to ensure a future for my people.” As Erick Erickson notes, “He is sympathetic to the ideals espoused by Bernie Sanders and wants state control of corporations.” He called himself an “Eco-fascist” who wanted a form of “Green Nationalism.” He railed against humans for destroying the environment and causing global warming, and he advocated government control to stop it. “The nation with the closest political and social values to my own,” he wrote, “is the People’s Republic of China.” That would be the Communist government of China.

Right winger? Hardly.

For his part, President Trump said, “I spoke with Prime Minister Ardern of New Zealandto express the sorrow of our entire nation following the monstrous terror attacks at two mosques.”

A final note: Attacks on houses of worship are, tragically, nothing new. The Associated Press compiled a list of 18 such attacks just over the last decade. Churches, mosques, synagogues — nothing is safe. Such violent hatred is pure evil. Indeed, the assailant bore symbols of Satanism among his belongings. Responsible people should rise above that evil with run-of-the-mill political disagreements.  ~The Patriot Post