Are the Inmates Running the Asylum Now?

Op-Ed by Scott Lazarowitz

This whole situation with the young people being brainwashed with leftist-authoritarian claptrap is really quite a thing now. I have no idea how to describe this situation in Amerika. It’s bizarre, to say the least.

The brainwashed college ignoramuses who shout down those who express a disagreement, and who physically threaten or assault those dissenters, remind me of the national security state apparatchiks such as Lindsey Graham who say you can’t question the so-called “war on terror” or we’ll call you a “terrorist sympathizer” and jail you indefinitely.

But the really bizarre thing is that the young robots are shouting down people and calling them “fascists,” showing that these young people have NO idea what “fascism” actually means. Not a clue. Many of them don’t even read, except the abbreviated text crap they are hypnotized with from their electronic gadget baby rattles. These little schmucks don’t seem to know the English language, as many of the teachers have become ideological social activists who themselves don’t seem to know the language, understand concepts or have learned critical thinking skills.

So this past week Yaron Brook from the Ayn Rand Institute was shouted down and attacked by “Antifa” goons as they called him a “fascist.” Reason has this article and video on that. The Antifa reactionaries reminded me of the “burn the witch” crowd from Monty Python.

Really, this modern cultural phenomenon of harassment and thuggery is quite barbaric, very Dark Ages stuff, quite frankly.

So calling the Ayn Rand people “fascists” even though the Ayn Rand people are generally individualists, who tend to be against fascism, as I wrote about here. (However, the Ayn Rand Institute and Yaron Brook’s foreign policy views are very anti-individualist, anti-private property, and very interventionist and collectivist, in my view. But that’s for a different discussion.)

The Antifa thugs acted like fascists, as one common part of fascism is censorship and the silencing of minority or dissenting points of view. But, as I just mentioned, many of these young people now don’t read, and these ones obviously don’t know the definition of “fascism” and its modern cultural variants.

And then the anti-political correctness feminist Christina Hoff Sommers was shouted down by a group of law students at Lewis and Clark College in Oregon. According to Reason, “the Portland National Lawyers Guild, Minority Law Students Association, Black Law Students Association, Women’s Law Caucus, Immigration Student Group, Jewish Law Society, Latino Law Society, OutLaw, and Lewis & Clark Young Democratic Socialists of America issued a joint-statement condemning the Federalist Society for inviting Sommers.”

Sommers was referred to as a “known fascist.” Again, more illiteracy. Based on what I have read about her, Sommers considers herself having “libertarian leanings,” according to Wikipedia, and is a proponent of “equity feminism” and an opponent of gender feminism.

In other words, Sommers is for thinking about those concepts in rational terms (as opposed to the hysterical, irrational loony-tunes of colleges “women’s studies” departments). And she is against coercive policies. The leftists who shout people down are generally in favor of coercion as a means to an end (i.e. they are “fascists”).

Now, those people opposing even letting Sommers appear at that forum or even tolerating her views being expressed, are law students, mind you. They are our future prosecuting attorneys, future judges. They will comprehend actual law about as much as most “law makers” on Capitol Hill do (i.e. not much). And for U.S. law students to know about law, they must really know about the law of the land of the country in which they reside, that law being the U.S.. Constitution, which, whether they like it or not, is the law of the land.

Unfortunately for the rest of us non-brainwashed rational people, the brainwashed ones are being fed this ideology regarding “oppression,” and they are really being made to believe that a dissenting point of view that doesn’t jibe with theirs is “violence” against them. Yes, they think that certain ideas or words are “violence.” So they are conditioned to respond with actual physical violence and shouting down their verbal “oppressors.”

So, now that I’m in my 50s, I’m in some way afraid of these young people. Some young people live in my building. “Is this one a brainwashed Antifa?” “Is that one getting tips on how to attack an ‘oppressor’?”

An “oppressor” being anyone who is a white male, and so on. These fanatics remind me of the anti-Muslim, anti-immigration crowd on conservative talk radio now. The collectivist mindset that besieged the 20th Century and caused tens of millions of deaths seems to be rearing its ugly head, once again. They are on the left, the right, and sadly, all points between, in Amerika.

As I wrote in July of 2013, “I don’t even talk to people that much anymore, like in the laundromat, out of fear that my opinions could be misinterpreted and thus I’d become the victim of an ‘If you see something, say something’ brownshirt-stasi-parasite.” It seems worse today.

I’m sure there are those who could see all of this coming years ago, even decades ago. In fact, George Orwell could see this 70 years ago, and wrote about such a society in his novel, 1984. We could have seen this coming in the 1960s with the “counter-culture,” the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that enabled anyone to sue anyone else for “discrimination,” and the feminists burning their bras during the 1970s.

And the more education became controlled by the State, more bureaucratized and centralized, the more dumbed down the kids were becoming. Now the young people are being terrorized by the hysterical post-9/11 police state. And many of the kids now are labeled “autistic,” “ADHD,” and being treated for “depression” by giving them psychiatric drugs. The psychiatric drugs of today are doing the same kinds of things to the thinking of today’s young people as the psychedelic drugs, the LSD was doing to the flower children of the 1960s and ’70s. (Similar to what I mentioned above, many of those 1960s and ’70s druggies are today’s lawyers, law professors, judges, “women’s studies” professors, congressmen and senators. Not good.)

Scott Lazarowitz is a libertarian writer and commentator. Please visit his blog.

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