Wokeism In Our Universities: An Authoritarian Threat To Be Defeated | The Rob Maness Show EP 368

Wokeism is a Marxist attack on human rights, and it is obviously emanating from our universities. America’s failure to recognize and deal with this attack could lead to a second civil war. The description of today’s guest’s book, America's Second Civil War: Progressivism's Authoritarian Threat, Where It Came from, and How to Defeat It reads: In the founding principles of the American Revolution—that all individuals have unalienable natural rights to life, liberty, and the fruits of their labor, and that governments should exist only to protect these rights—were unique in human history. The nation’s failure to secure equal rights for all to self-ownership eventually led to a civil war but just four decades later, social science faculties at the country’s top colleges and universities repudiated the country’s founding principles. The cause of this startling change was the education that hundreds of American college students and graduates received in German universities in the late 19th century. Germany’s professor class was dominated by state socialists who taught that individuals had no natural rights, only privileges granted to them by the government. American students absorbed these beliefs and after their return, established this country’s first graduate-level programs, seeding the first generation of PhDs. Inventing the name “progressives” for themselves, their goal was to recast America’s governmental and economic institutions in the image of Germany’s authoritarian government and oligarchical society. Higher education was transformed with disastrous results for the humanities and social sciences. Generation after generation of students, including those who went on to teach, abandoned this country’s traditional relationship of the individual to the state. Over the next several decades, American politics, journalism, law, and education evolved in directions inimical to the nation’s founding principles, leaving the country increasingly fractured—not unlike the decades leading up to the first Civil War. My guest today is the author of Winning America's Second Civil War. Jeffrey E. Paul is a research professor in the Social Philosophy Center at West Virginia University. He was previously a professor at the University of Arizona, and is professor emeritus at Bowling Green State University, where he played a pivotal role in the original founding of the Social Philosophy and Policy Center and was its Associate Director