The University of California at Berkeley is one of the most elite universities in America. Look at this stone-cold anti-white racism coming from one of its professors, Zeus Leonardo:

Recommended reading from the professor of education at Berkeley includes concepts such as “white people are not born white”.

White people are “born human” and then “white parents physically and psychologically ABUSE them” into becoming “white people”. pic.twitter.com/GOtjrFCC7m

— Mythinformed MKE (@MythinformedMKE) October 18, 2021

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Here he is favorably discussing a reading: “Her suggestion is that white children were not white originally; they were born human.” He goes on to approvingly cite the claim that “white families” are agents of socialization into “whiteness” — a clear predicate for the state going after the family in the cause of anti-racism. We know well how many schools today have written policies designed to deceive families about their children who present as trans or genderfluid at school. These leftist radicals despise the family, and will not hesitate to use their power to hurt it for the cause of social justice.

Elite American universities are the Radio Mille Collines of our time. By now, it is routine to say, Can you believe it? Can you believe this racism? Somebody has to do something about it! Of course nobody will do a damn thing about it. This racist mountebank, Prof. Leonardo, ought to be fired — but he will, in fact, be celebrated for his anti-white hatred, and rewarded within the system. When I pointed out a few years ago that Prof. Tommy Curry at Texas A&M was a fountain of anti-white hatred, in his spoken and published works, and published the evidence here, the Chronicle of Higher Education did a big piece on how the poor man was demonized by a right-wing journalist. If it’s not clear by now that anti-white racism in American higher education is not a bug, but a feature, I don’t know what’s going to do it. And if it’s not clear by now that nobody in the American ruling class gives a damn that white kids arrive at elite universities and are told that they are “the problem” (see Leonardo’s graphic) because of their color of their skin.

You tell me, reader: why, exactly, should white people who don’t believe that they are evil because of the color of their skin feel any loyalty at all to a country led by racists of many colors? The best thing about classical liberalism is that by centering the individual, it provided a workable means by which very different kinds of people in a pluralistic society can live together in relative peace. We all know that it is not and never has been perfect. This is what the Civil Rights movement was about: making our liberal democracy more perfect by making it stop demonizing black Americans for the color of their skin. What the fact that things like the Zeno Leonardo comments exist in many places, and nobody in the ruling class — not the media, nobody — gives a damn tells you that we are no longer a classically liberal country. Or rather, we remain one in name only. We are now an illiberal left-wing country, at least among those who rule us.

More evidence: read the FIRE.org detailed account of Yale Law School administrators bullying a conservative Native American student after nine black students complained about his invitation to a Federalist Society event (he’s a member). Excerpts:

Free speech is in jeopardy yet again at Yale University, where law school administrators met with a student multiple times to pressure him to apologize for language he used in an email that offended some of his classmates. The incident illustrates how university officials can seek to intimidate students into silence and conformity through obscure procedures and veiled threats of punishment.

Put yourself in the shoes of a law student. You’re called to multiple meetings with administrators over an email you wrote that offended other students. The language in the email is clearly protected by the school’s guarantees of free speech. You nevertheless discover that multiple students have filed discrimination and harassment complaints. You’re repeatedly told you should issue a public apology if you want the matter to “go away.” You’re told the issue might “linger” even after you graduate and that the “legal community is a small one.” Administrators even go so far as to write an apology for you. They repeatedly reference their administrative roles — the need to produce a final “report” to the university’s administration, the possibility of a “formal recommendation” for bias training. At no time are you assured your speech is protected. And right before you leave one of these meetings, the administrators imply that the matter could somehow wind up before the state bar. A bar that requires you to pass a searching review of your character and fitness.

And when you ask the administrators to clarify, you’re ignored for two weeks.

The most egregious part of this entirely outrageous episode is the diversity dean, Yaseen Eldik, providing a written confession and apology for the student, Trent Colbert, to sign:

Eldik also sent Colbert a draft apology addressed to BLSA leaders “as a way to help give you a start.”

When Colbert hadn’t apologized by the evening of Sept. 16, Cosgrove sent an email to Yale Law’s entire second-year class to “condemn . . . in the strongest possible terms” the assertedly “pejorative and racist language” in Colbert’s Constitution Day invitation. Colbert texted Eldik that he was not happy with Cosgrove’s email, and they arranged to meet again the next day.

A university like Yale must allow students and faculty members to express themselves freely and criticize each other’s speech without administrative interference and prepackaged apologies.

At that Sept. 17 meeting, Colbert said he attended a gathering where he had talked to some BLSA members and other students about the incident and “things went well.” Nevertheless, Eldik continued to push Colbert to issue a written apology and to meet with other students. “I’m not trying to make you write something you don’t want to write,” Eldik said, before telling Colbert how to write the apology: “I think it’s important to say in the first few lines, as someone who’s written dozens of these, is you just want to . . . apologize for any upset, um, frustration that this has caused.” Eldik hoped Colbert would “get at least a two-sentence apology out” to the offended students before the administrators circled back with them.

Eldik also noted that he hadn’t made a “formal recommendation” for Colbert to undergo bias training because Colbert had done so much “active listening to some of the cultural contexts” and had “been so receptive to a lot of what” Eldik had said. Here again, Eldik invoked his authority to impose consequences on Colbert for not cooperating.

At the end of the meeting, Eldik told Colbert, “I don’t have to do my job like this. I want to do my job like this.”

He then left Colbert with these ominous words: “You’re a law student, and there’s a bar you have to take you know and it’s just, you know, we think it’s important to really give you a 360 view.”

As The Free Beacon noted, the state bar character and fitness reviews often involve close scrutiny of an applicant’s record and background: “The New York State Bar, for example, asks law schools to describe any ‘discreditable information’ that might bear upon an ‘applicant’s character,’ even if it did not result in formal discipline.” Law school graduates must pass character and fitness review to become licensed attorneys.

Read it all. And if you have 23 minutes, listen to the secretly recorded audio of the Yale diversity commissar trying to explain to Trent Colbert why he is a racist, and ought to sign the confession.

This is straight out of the Soviet playbook. Thank God Trent Colbert is not a pushover. Imagine how many young men and women, when threatened with the ruin of their careers by a law school official, would have conformed to protect their futures.

A prominent Yale professor speaks out about this:

But not when American regime officials do it for the cause of Anti-Racism. They privilege anti-liberal agitators like the nine black Yale Law students who went crying to the authorities to get them to punish a fellow student who wrote words (“trap house”) that they didn’t like, and who, though part Cherokee, belongs to the conservative legal society, which, being conservative, is RACIST!

Prof. Christakis appears briefly in my book Live Not By Lies. Excerpt:

A memorable example is the 2015 Yale University clash between Professors Nicholas and Erika Christakis and enraged students from the residential college overseen by the faculty couple. Things went very badly for the Christakises, old-school liberals who erred by thinking that the students could be engaged with the tools and procedures of reason. Alas, the students were in the grip of the religion of social justice. As such, they considered their subjective beliefs to be a form of uncontestable knowledge, and disagreement as an attack on their identity.

You want to watch the moment in 2015 when classical liberalism died at Yale? Here is Nicholas Christakis trying to engage student critics in reasoned debate. They just shriek, curse, weep, emote, and demand an apology:

In case you’ve forgotten, Yale University’s administration sided with the illiberal mob that attacked the Christakises. This is why I added this to the Live Not By Lies remarks about the Christakises:

Some conservatives think that SJWs should be countered with superior arguments and if conservatives stick with liberal proceduralism they will prevail. This is a fundamental error that blinds conservatives to the radical nature of the threat. You cannot know how to judge and act in the face of these challenges if you cannot see the social justice warriors for what they truly are—and where they do their work. It is easy to identify the shrieking student on the university quad, but it is more important to be able to spot the subversive presence of older SJWs and fellow travelers throughout institutional bureaucracies, where they exercise immense power.

Yes — people like Ellen Cosgrove and Yaseen Eldik, the persecutors of Trent Colbert.

Again, it is highly significant that this kind of thing occurs over and over, and … nothing happens. Where are the student demonstrations at Yale to support Trent Colbert? They aren’t happening, and they won’t happen because either the students side with the punitive administrators, or because the students don’t want to jeopardize their position within this corrupt system. I spoke recently with a conservative academic who has courageously taken public stands to defend classically liberal causes, and he confided that it infuriates him to hear from lots of fellow academics how much they support and value his speaking out. These are people who always say it silently, but rarely if ever have the courage to stand up themselves. I told him that I well understood this. From 2001 to 2005, when I was a Catholic writing critically about the Catholic priest sex abuse scandal, I heard from priests and prominent Catholics all the time, telling me how grateful they were for the work I did. I appreciated it, but I noticed that very, very few of them had the courage to say that publicly, when it might have done real good.

Call me optimistic (please — nobody else ever does!), but I don’t believe that most Americans, of all races, believe this radical garbage. But if they are going to remain passive, they might as well believe it. From Live Not By Lies:

The post-World War I generation of writers and artists were marked by their embrace and celebration of anti-cultural philosophies and acts as a way of demonstrating contempt for established hierarchies, institutions, and ways of thinking. Arendt said of some writers who glorified the will to power, “They read not Darwin but the Marquis de Sade.”

Her point was that these authors did not avail themselves of respectable intellectual theories to justify their transgressiveness. They immersed themselves in what is basest in human nature and regarded doing so as acts of liberation. Arendt’s judgment of the postwar elites who recklessly thumbed their noses at respectability could easily apply to those of our own day who shove aside liberal principles like fair play, race neutrality, free speech, and free association as obstacles to equality. Arendt wrote:

The members of the elite did not object at all to paying a price, the destruction of civilization, for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in the past forced their way into it.

Here is more from the book, about why it is foolish to write all this stuff off as craziness confined to intellectual ghettos:

In our populist era, politicians and talk-radio polemicists can rile up a crowd by denouncing elites. Nevertheless, in most societies, intellectual and cultural elites determine its long-term direction. “[T]he key actor in history is not individual genius but rather the network and the new institutions that are created out of those networks,” writes sociologist James Davison Hunter. Though a revolutionary idea might emerge from the masses, says Hunter, “it does not gain traction until it is embraced and propagated by elites” working through their “well-developed networks and powerful institutions.”

This is why it is critically important to keep an eye on intellectual discourse. Those who do not will leave the gates unguarded. As the Polish dissident and émigré Czesław Miłosz put it, “It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books of philosophy.”

Arendt warns that the twentieth-century totalitarian experience shows how a determined and skillful minority can come to rule over an indifferent and disengaged majority. In our time, most people regard the politically correct insanity of campus radicals as not worthy of attention. They mock them as “snowflakes” and “social justice warriors.”

This is a serious mistake. In radicalizing the broader class of elites, social justice warriors (SJWs) are playing a similar historic role to the Bolsheviks in prerevolutionary Russia. SJW ranks are full of middle-class, secular, educated young people wracked by guilt and anxiety over their own privilege, alienated from their own traditions, and desperate to identify with something, or someone, to give them a sense of wholeness and purpose. For them, the ideology of social justice—as defined not by church teaching but by critical theorists in the academy—functions as a pseudo-religion. Far from being confined to campuses and dry intellectual journals, SJW ideals are transforming elite institutions and networks of power and influence.

The social justice cultists of our day are pale imitations of Lenin and his fiery disciples. Aside from the ruthless antifa faction, they restrict their violence to words and bullying within bourgeois institutional contexts. They prefer to push around college administrators, professors, and white-collar professionals. Unlike the Bolsheviks, who were hardened revolutionaries, SJWs get their way not by shedding blood but by shedding tears.

Yet there are clear parallels—parallels that those who once lived under communism identify.

If you want to know more, buy Live Not By Lies. Share it with your friends. Download the free study guide, and talk about it together. This soft totalitarianism is not going away anytime soon. We have to understand what it is so we can fight it — and if it ultimately triumphs for a while, we have to know how to live within it without losing our minds and our souls. You don’t believe it’s that serious? Here is a public letter recently released by a Soviet-born professor at Pitt, warning that the Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity (DIE) programs the university is forcing on people are reminiscent of what the Soviets did. Everywhere I travel these days, people come up to me and say things like, “My grandfather emigrated from the Soviet bloc, and he’s been saying what you’re saying for years.”

We are watching our country destroyed by these elites, with no effective opposition arising to fight them. Donald Trump? Please. He is the best friend the Woke have. He talked a big game, but when it came down to it, he choked far too often, because he was not interested in being disciplined and following through. And, as GOP Sen. Bill Cassidy points out in the Axios interview, Trump, as leader of the Republican Party, arrived in office with the Republicans holding the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives … and he left with the Democrats holding all three. As this crisis grows more and more serious, conservatives desperately need a leader who has the courage to take on the Woke establishment, and the political skills to do real damage to their soft totalitarianism. Is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis the one to do it? Maybe. Is Sen. Josh Hawley? Could be. We won’t know, though, until and unless Trump gets over himself enough to stand down and let somebody else take a shot.

In any case, don’t lose focus on the deeper point: that a country in which people embedded within elite institutions can be so openly and disgustingly racist, and so openly and disgustingly totalitarian (re: trying to force a law student to sign a pre-written confession), and suffer no consequences for it — that’s a country that is losing its soul. We are watching it happen in real time, and most people just carry on with their lives, as if we were living in normal times. Too many people think, “We are America; it can’t happen here.” But it is happening here, right now.

Meanwhile, as our leaders pursue policies that destroy American values, teach Americans to hate each other based on race, making the world safer for women to bind their breasts and men to chop off their penises and testicles, and the would-be opposition contents itself with producing lib-owning memes, China has other plans:

While Rome put on finger polish. pic.twitter.com/NvFhaSiBuK

— Patrick Deneen (@PatrickDeneen) October 16, 2021