‘The Ideological Rot Runs Deep, and It Is Thorough,’ Says Washington Examiner Editor Kaylee McGee White

WASHINGTON DC, Dec 8 — Higher education is not what it used to be, says Kaylee McGee White, the Restoring America Editor for the Washington Examiner. Colleges and universities are supposed to help the next generations “understand their role in society, who they are as human beings and what they have to give to society and what their place is in it.” In a recent interview with Rebecca Weber, CEO of the Association of Mature American Citizens and host of AMAC’s Better For America podcast, White explained that “those goals have been completely distorted by the vast majority of college campuses today.”

In an article she penned in the Examiner, A better kind of college blacklist, White noted that “the rise in radicalism that we’ve seen on display after the Hamas attack on Israel, where you see a number of students openly endorsing a terrorist organization and the attacks on Jewish Israelis is not isolated radicalism. This is not limited to radicalism. This is actually very much in line with other behavior that we’ve seen displayed over the past several years.”

As she explained it, “college is supposed to prepare students for the next phase of life…  to help them get better jobs, help them make more money in the future. The second purpose of higher education, which is the most important, is that higher education is supposed to help form the character of students. It’s supposed to help them understand their role in society, who they are as human beings and what they have to give to society and what their place is in society. Unfortunately, both of those goals have been completely distorted by the vast majority of college campuses today. There’s a reason why, in a recent poll, more than 56 percent of Americans said they have very little confidence in America’s colleges to be able to prepare students for better jobs.”

In particular, White noticed that left leaning college campuses have stopped trying to teach students. Instead, she said,  they’ve been “indoctrinating them and telling them what they should believe and how they should act and what they should say. One example of this is what we call service learning. It’s made up of courses taught by college administrators rather than professors, courses that encourage students to participate in civic activity [such as] taking part in protests, volunteering at the local Planned Parenthood.  Students are actually getting college credit for taking part in these activities. The goal is to encourage students to participate in left wing civic activities.  Hardly ever will you see professors or administrators encourage students to partake in a conservative rally or host a conservative speaker. So there is a specific ideological bent that students are being pushed toward.”

She said that it may come as a surprise that American college students support Hamas in its war with Israel. Indeed, White said, it’s worrisome to see students at anti-Israel protests, to see them endorsing “the genocide of Jewish people.” She noted that a number of employers have come out in support of Israel and “want those students to be blacklisted from future careers because they are not capable of participating in a society that is grounded on basic ethical norms if you’re endorsing the actions of a terrorist organization. What college blacklists also help do is incentivize students who actually care about education, who actually care about being productive citizens. It discourages those students from seeking to affiliate with schools like Harvard, like Stanford, like Yale that have proven themselves to be morally bankrupt.”

Moving on, White tackled the issue of “gender ideology,” what she described as the “rejection of objective truth itself, the idea that there aren’t two sexes, that you can choose whatever you want to be, that you can change who you are without any consequences. That’s asinine, it’s not truth. And yet we are teaching millions of young children that they can reject objective truth about who they are and about how they fit into this world. Objective truth about basic biological realities with zero consequence, and there have already been serious consequences from that ideological indoctrination.” 

As she put it, there have been “horrible stories of the consequences that they’re dealing with both physically and emotionally from being captured by this ideology by trying to destroy who they were and change who they were because they believed that they could. These stories are harrowing and should really give us pause to consider what we’re doing to the next generation. The ideological rot runs deep, and it is thorough. It has captured almost every single American institution, from the Supreme Court, at least with one justice, to the K-12 public education system, to healthcare, to the entire scientific research community. It is deep, it is rotten, and it has to be rooted out. Yet we’re being told, and we are teaching millions of young children that they can reject objective truth about who they are and about how they fit into this world.”

FOOTNOTE: The Hill news site issued a report earlier this week noting that “Both Republican and Democratic members of the House tore into three university presidents Tuesday at a hearing focused on the responses their colleges have had to the rise in antisemitism since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack … The presidents of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) all had to defend their policies, though they often declined to give specifics. ‘ Today, each of you have a chance to answer to atone for the many specific instances of vitriolic, hate-filled antisemitism on your respective campuses that have denied students the safe learning environment,’ Rep. Virginia Fox  (R-N.C.), chairwoman for the House Education Committee, told them in her opening statement.”

John Grimaldi served on the first non-partisan communications department in the New York State Assembly and is a founding member of the Board of Directors of Priva Technologies, Inc. He has served for more than thirty years as a Trustee of Daytop Village Foundation, which oversees a worldwide drug rehabilitation network.