Why Silly Campus Stunts are Serious Business | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's note: This post, by Jim Tynen, was originally published in the free speech section of Civitas's online edition.

    You may have seen some of the bizarre things happening at universities recently and thought these students and professors must be stupid, crazy or just ignorant of what freedom is all about.

    But professor and writer Mike Adams this week said the opposite is true: campus radicals attacking free speech and traditional culture know exactly what they are doing and why they are doing it: to foment a Marxist revolution.

    "What [campus radicals] are trying to do is radically transform the culture," he said. "The mechanism of changing the culture revolves around free speech and that's why this is a huge issue for us."

    Adams, a criminology professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, outlined the real basis for campus speech codes and other left-wing causes in his talk March 7 at the Icon Lecture Series in Chapel Hill.

    What was most interesting to me was how he took us behind the curtain to show us the real motivations and goals of so many of the outlandish goings-on at colleges and universities. I suppose most of us read about campus radicals, and perhaps mutter about their protests and complaints, but then shrug our shoulders and go on about our business.

    After all, their complaints seem so absurd and random. Adams mentioned a professor who told an assembled group about a professor who said he identified as male on Monday, Wednesday and Friday ... and identified as female on Tuesdays and Thursday. (It wasn't clear what that professor identified as on weekends.) That is so far out to most of us that we don't take it too seriously.

    But it's all part of a long-term, relentless strategy to weaken the culture, paving the way for a Marxist transformation of society, he said. For, in addition to the economic Marxism we're familiar with, there's cultural Marxism, in which radicals seek to fundamentally transform society to undermine the family, religion, morality, and other forces that might stand in the way of radicalism.

    Fighting Free Speech

    First of all, he said, we have to understand the key Marxist axiom: From each according to his abilities, and to each according to his needs.

    But "who on earth would think that's a good deal - 'I want to be average'?" Adams said. "Marxism is for losers. I mean that literally: It benefits losers."

    So Marxism can't be sold to people able to understand its goals. "You can't possibly have radical transformation of the culture unless you interfere with the marketplace of ideas," he said of leftists. "Their success in getting really bad ideas accepted on campuses has hinged on their ability to interfere with freedom of expression and to undermine the First Amendment."

    He recalled arriving on the campus of UNC Wilmington and finding that the student handbook included a speech code that proclaimed people "had a right to be comfortable and unoffended"! But, as Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote, "Every idea is an incitement."

    Almost anything might offend somebody somewhere - especially if he or she has been primed to take offense. That handbook, for instance, said students could be punished for "misdirected laughter," if while laughing they happened to glance at someone nearby.

    Again, this may be absurd, but don't be distracted: If leftists can get students to fear thinking and talking, they will lose their ability to resist leftist propaganda.

    There has been some progress in cutting back speech codes on campus, he said, but the same strategy has continued with the assault on "microaggressions" - harmless comments or actions that the Left construes as racist. For that too is a prong of the attack on society, Adams said.

    "White privilege" in cultural Marxism is the counterpart of capitalism in economic capitalism, radicals believe. "They need to overthrow capitalism in the economic level and 'white privilege' in the cultural level," Adams said.

    And how is that done?

    Creating More Losers

    If communism is for losers, then it's also essential for communists to create more losers. The vehicles for that kind of cultural change are mandatory student fees and campus centers for special groups, he said.

    These centers and fee-funded projects aim to destroy students' moral bearings, leaving them psychologically and spiritually weaker, thus in greater need of powerful government to help them. Adams cited a "poetry" journal published under the aegis of a campus student center. It included a poem about Mother Teresa that can't even be described in our newspaper. "It was worse than anything you'd find written on the walls of a bar on Franklin Street," Adams said.

    Or consider the "orgasm awareness day" sponsored by Western Carolina University or the "orgasm awareness week" sponsored by UNC-Chapel Hill, he said.

    "What is behind all of sexual politics ... is just of a larger scheme to transform the culture," he said. "What they really want to do is to destroy marriage."

    That's why young, impressionable people are targeted by Left, he said. "It's as if they're being preyed upon by these cultural warriors."

    "They're trying to sexualize our children, because what they're really trying to do is take a look at sex and marriage and procreation and split them from one another," he continued. "Because if you want to have a big government in a Marxist society, you have to have weak families."

    He did note that parents and lawmakers are beginning to understand these influences, and are fighting back successfully. But anyone there that night who truly grasped his talk understands one thing above all: Defeating cultural Marxism will require that we treat it very seriously indeed.