From the movie Idiocracy: “But Brawndo’s
got what plants crave. It’s got electrolytes!” Click for video.

Recently the satirical site the Babylon Bee illustrated starkly and with great humor the sad state of American universities.

Genius Trump Enacts Plan To Dumb Down Chinese Population By Inviting Them To Attend American Universities

Trump’s plan was praised by national security experts, who cited it as a brilliant maneuver to reduce China’s influence on global affairs in the long term by shrewdly allowing their students to be made substantially less intelligent at educational institutions in the U.S.

“Pretty soon, Chinese kids will all be dumb, just as dumb as American students,” the president reportedly told his advisors. “We’ll let in hundreds of thousands of Chinese students, have them waste their time at American universities sitting in gender studies classes and college courses about Taylor Swift, and the next thing you know, China will be in the toilet. If it worked here, it can work there. It’ll make things very difficult for the Chinamen, believe me. Very difficult.”

The joke worked because it has now become common knowledge that for much of the American educational system — especially at its so-called “elite” universities — the quality of education has hit rock bottom. Students are not only not learning much of importance, they are being indoctrinated into believing in absurdities, such as a man can become a woman merely by saying so, or that communism will finally work if only the right people were given the power to install it.

Worse, they are being taught that the left is the only correct political choice, and any other ideas are simply evil. The murder of conservatives is therefore absolutely a just act. From an April 7, 2025 tweet by Charlie Kirk:

Assassination culture is spreading on the left. Forty-eight percent of liberals say it would be at least somewhat justified to murder Elon Musk. Fifty-five percent said the same about Donald Trump. In California, activists are naming ballot measures after Luigi Mangione.

The left is being whipped into a violent frenzy. Any setback, whether losing an election or losing a court case, justifies a maximally violent response. This is the natural outgrowth of left-wing protest culture tolerating violence and mayhem for years on end. The cowardice of local prosecutors and school officials have turned the left into a ticking time bomb.

Kirk’s tweet was sadly prescient. The source of that graph comes from a research report described here.

As a first step, it is clear that a major house-cleaning at these universities is necessary. We saw that happen this week when students at Texas A&M released video evidence that a teacher was still teaching queer transgender theories in a children’s literature course, despite the university and the state government clearly setting policies in the past year that eliminated such material from coursework. Within days the teacher and her dean were fired. Unlike in the past, there was no pussy-footing around, no interim suspension (with pay) that would be canceled once the heat died down. These individuals are gone, and there is strong movement to fire a lot more, including the university president, Mark Welsh, who initially defended the teaching of the queer agenda and said no action would be taken.

However, though house-cleaning is a good first step, it is only a beginning. To really fix our education system will require a major shift in basic teaching philosophy. Right now it appears the goal of universities is to force feed ideas and facts into the minds of students, most often from a leftist perspective.

That isn’t education, it’s indoctrination. It is also counter to the very principles of western civilization that founded these universities in the first place.

Our educational system, including not just the universities but at all grades, from kindergarten to high school, have to return education back to the one fundamental concept that began with the Enlightenment in the 1600s and fueled our culture of freedom and tolerance for the next four hundred years. Educators have to once again become focused on teaching students how to think. While what you teach them is important, you need to teach them many perspectives from all sides, with the goal of training them to think critically about that knowledge, to question everything, and to distinguish between good and bad ideas, on their own.

Certainly you can teach them about Marx, but if you don’t include Adam Smith, and compare the two, you are not providing a real education. And right now, almost no school in America is teaching anything but Marx.

It is time for our education system entered
the truth booth.

By teaching a wide range of knowledge, and insisting the student analyze for themselves what works and what does not, the student will learn how to think critically. And critical thinking gives one the power to dig for the truth, which is the hallmark of western civilization. As Richard Feynman said,

It doesn’t make a difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn’t make a difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is. If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong.

The truth is what matters, not the person who said it or the elegance of the theory or how righteous the goals sound. If students know how to search for truth critically, they will be better armed to distinguish fact from fiction and good ideas from foolish “isms.”

This is how we will reinvigorate our education system. If we make the search for truth the central goal of education, it won’t matter if a school still wants to teach Marxist DEI crap. The students will be able see right through its stupid idiocy and choose for themselves.