When Dimwits Attack

Here is yet more proof that stupidity knows no lower boundary: The VRWC at Dartmouth and beyond

This is a story that is on the one hand very local, and on the other has far-reaching national implications. It is no big stretch to say that the VRWC, the vast rightwing conspiracy, is attempting a takeover of Dartmouth College.

What does it matter if the far right takes over Dartmouth? It means just over a thousand students a year being taught by professors to whom a conservative litmus test has been applied. It means a new training ground for rightwing pundits like Laura Ingraham and Dinesh D'Souza (both of whom came out of Dartmouth in the 1980s heyday of the Dartmouth Review). It means a prestigious academic home from which conservative faculty could themselves act as pundits, or draw support for their research. And it provides a blueprint for future assaults on other colleges and universities; it is, in the words of one of its leaders, part of a "multigenerational battle."

Here's the deal: Dartmouth has an unusually small board of trustees, with half the trustees historically elected by the alumni. In recent years, a group of alums has organized to elect hard right trustees, with the intent of rolling back two decades of Dartmouth's movement away from its infamously conservative past. Because the board of trustees is so small, it is vulnerable to the election of just a few people.

Just step back and think about the full implication of this sadly typical Daily Kos garbage. This is basically saying that the role of left of center academics is to remove any right of center voices from the academy. There is no other way to understand this. In this view removing conservative from posts of influence within academia is par for the course. Any attempt by conservatives to resist such removal is the "vast right wing conspiracy" coming to get you!

And, this post makes it clear that the goal is to remove conservatives from academia permanently:

This is a radical program to bring the worst intersection of neo-con and fundamentalist thought to higher education -- to engage in a multigenerational battle to take over your children's education, and the airwaves, and the courts. It's not just about what happens in the colleges themselves, but about the influence they can have, about the conservative infrastructure they can have waiting for the next time a George W. Bush is elected president and wants to staff an administration with lawyers who will find the justification for torture, for steamrolling Congress, for the unitary executive.

...

This isn't just Dartmouth. It's just the first step.

Gee, "neo-cons" as a secret cabal working behind the scenes to take over the world. Nice to see the Kosacks (how appropriate!) have dusted off the meme of using the old "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" crap again. (Who knew it was so versatile?)

I've always been against David Horowitz's attempts to introduce legislative controls over academia to ensure "ideological diversity" because it always struck me as a cure worse than the disease. Reading truly moronic and evil bullshit like the kind peddled by the Daily Kos is almost enough to get me to change my mind.

Almost.