Project Veritas caught a Bernie Sanders field organizer airing his Marxist resentments the other day.

Hero of the Revolution Kyle Jurek opined that billionaires and Trump supporters might need to be sent to gulags to re-educate them and wake them up to their “privilege.”

But the United States already offers institutions to re-educate people into the Revolution and wake them up to their privilege.

Hint: the institutions rhyme with “knowledge.”

Joseph Stalin was brilliant in his evil way; but even Stalin never thought of creating gulags that people would pay and fight to get *into*. And now, the United States has the University Archipelago, where students receive costly certification as Right Thinking Workers of the Revolution, with all their anti-socialist tendencies erased.

NEWSPEAK AND “SOCIAL JUSTICE”

Many universities are moving their focus from the pursuit of truth toward social justice–a trend NYU social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has discussed extensively and is worth listening to:

“Social justice” is Newspeak for Marxist class warfare, the fight to destroy “reactionaries” (as Jurek correctly terms conservatives in the Marxist lexicon) and forcibly create a system that is “fair for everyone”–except for fascist reactionaries, who must be broken and reformed to the new order by any means necessary.

And as Jurek and his ideological grandfather Vladimir Lenin make clear: *any* means necessary … including terror, confinement, and indiscriminate murder.

Marxism has a history of sanitizing itself with new terminology after each failure or crime against humanity. The proletariat become “marginalized people.” The Revolution becomes “The Resistance.” Marxist terrorism becomes “demonstrations for justice.” Reactionaries become “white people, billionaires, Deplorables, Republicans” et. al. State control of the means of production becomes “Healthcare for All! College for All! Jobs for All!” Gotta love Newspeak.

MARXIST PROGRAMMING IN THE UNIVERSITIES

If the comparison of universities to Marxist totalitarian institutions seems hyperbolic, consider the Race Equality Champion Program just launched at Sheffield University in Merry Ol’ England.

There, students are hired to walk around and police their fellow students’ “microaggressions” (statements that makes members of victim groups “uncomfortable“).

One of these latter-day thought police insists: “This isn’t about silencing people. We want to give students the tools to think critically about perceptions of racism in our society.”

That seems well intentioned on its face. But what if offenders refuse to accept the proffered tools of critical racism thinking (whatever the deuce those are)? Will the Sheffield thought police use the threat of sanctions to force reeducation on offenders? Will stubborn microagressors who insist upon saying awful things like “Where are you from?” and “I don’t want to hear about your trip to Africa” find themselves turfed out of an education?

Or will the thought police become–as many commentators have wondered aloud–informers on their classmates’ private conversations, like the East German Stasi or the KGB? Will students start to censor themselves and wear full-time masks, afraid of saying something that will be taken amiss or used against them?

Three-quarters of Republican students in the United States now say they hide their politics to avoid trouble, so this is not an idle question.

In his Nobel-Prize winning book on Stalinism The Captive Mind, Czeslaw Milosz describes how Soviet society turned into one big stage performance, as citizens worked to speak and behave according to the Marxist state’s script, so as to avoid disappearance.

Universities–and not just Sheffield–seem to be adopting the Soviet model with enthusiasm: “Figure out the script here and follow it–and the weekly changes too–or you will disappear from campus and wind up working at McDonald’s.”

MEANWHILE, VICTIMHOOD REPLACES EXPANSION

As discussed in Denialism, the Academy, and AOC, the real value of college lies not in memorizing a litany of facts (or in many humanities today, woke propaganda) but in giving undergraduates a sense of how much they DON’T know about the vastness of human experience and knowledge.

But as woking-off takes up more and more of the time spent at college, students in many universities and many disciplines aren’t exploring the maze of existence and knowledge much. They acquire neither a grasp of learning’s wonders nor a historical sense of the dark side of human nature, the chaos that lurks in the human heart.

Instead, they learn: (1) “If you are a victim, here’s how to leverage that into all kind of social and career benefits“; and (2) “If you’re not a victim, here’s all the things to NOT do and NOT say in order to stay out of trouble with victims and get your four-year meal certificate.

“Either way, don’t bother with dead white authors, non-woke biology, non-woke social psychology, the white man’s mathematics, ‘human nature,’ and Judeo-Christian religion. It’s just oppression and racisms all the way down.”

LOOKING FOR SOMEONE TO BLAME

A Western journalist recounted an odd story from his visit to Soviet Russia. When a ship sank due to a malfunction, the communists’ first question was not “What happened to sink the ship?” but instead “Whom do we *blame*?”

Marxism instills a mindset of victimhood in the population; and victims reflexively search for someone to blame. From grade school onward, American youth are now taught to either indulge their victimhood and blame others (“society,” “white privilege,” “fascists,” “fat cats,” etc.); or to tiptoe around victims when they can’t find some dubious disability, smidgen of Cherokee blood, or other pretext to give them social status and influence in the new order.

This pervasive victim worship is not love or charity toward the less fortunate. It’s entitled irresponsibility on the one hand and induced cowardice on the other.

The “College for All!” initiative of Democratic candidates pretends to be an effort at improving young people and making them self-sufficient. Really, they want to herd as many into the gulags as they can and cultivate the faith in victimhood that powers their socialist vision of the United States’ future.