Critical American institutions are crumbing before our eyes because the intellectual elites charged with caring for those institutions are failing on a grand scale.
In academia, business, and government people in critical leadership positions are failing the most basic responsibilities and across the spectrum. Students, stockholders, customers, and citizens are suffering failure, as is the culture as a whole.
Take the disgrace that is elite higher academia. Harvard stood by the wholly unqualified and serial plagiarist Claudine Gay, until the situation was so bad it was comical. If the boards overseeing Harvard University truly cared about protecting the institution, Gay would have never been hired with her anemic almost non-existent academic and writing background. Next, they would have fired her immediately after her disastrous performance in front of congress.
Yet, the smartest of the smartest, the elite of the elite of Harvard were bound and determined to support radical diversity polices, to the determent of the university. By the time they finally threw Gay overboard, Harvard lost hundreds of millions in donations, saw a dramatic drop in applications, and became a laughingstock of higher learning.
At the moment, the picture of national academic disgrace is Columbia President Minouche Shafik. She has allowed this NYC institution to be completely overtaken by antisemitic Hamas lovers. Jews are cursed, slurred, and prevented from attending in-person class. This should never happen on any campus in American.
Shafik has constantly set, then failed to follow through on, deadlines for removal of the prohibited encampments. This is not that hard. Set the rules. Enforce them. Make clear that the core functions of the university like holding classes, graduation, and other learning experiences will not be interrupted. Have a no-tolerance policy for chants of genocide and the “final solution.”
No university should permit full face masking on their campus, especially at a protest. The Columbia president, and leaders at other liberal institutions have turned over their campuses to antisemitic mobs.
However, it should be noted that not all academic leaders are failing. Presidents at the state universities of Florida, Texas, and Mississippi have not banned protests, but enforced clear rules. They have protected all students.
University of Florida arrested numerous individuals for breaking rules and refusing to disperse when ordered. Students who were arrested face a three year suspension.
As university spokesman said: “The University of Florida is not a daycare, and we do not treat protesters like children — they knew the rules, they broke the rules, and they’ll face the consequences.”
However the elite of the elite at the most highly recognized institutions are failing in mass to protect their institutions. They are failing to protect Jews and the learning environment. They are allowing iconic American institutions to implode due to a lack of leadership or action, or just plain antisemitism.
In business, Boeing has become the face of DEI disaster. As noted by CNN, “Hardly a day has gone by in 2024 without a bad headline for Boeing, from life-threatening mid-flight crises up above to entrenched business debacles happening on the ground.”
Much of this began when, in 2022, Boeing started giving bonuses based on DEI and climate benchmarks, not traditional metrics like safety, sales, and quality. Their 2023 “Global Equity, Diversity & Inclusion Report” explicitly stated that “in 2022, for the first time in our company’s history, we tied incentive compensation to inclusion.”
Boeing now has planes with loose bolts, doors that won’t stay shut, and planes that are grounded. In just a few years the elite that run Boeing lost focus of safety and innovation. Boeing has gone from the most respected Airplane manufacturer in the world to an aviation joke, a dangerous one.
Disney, once the world’s leader in family entertainment, has delayed a new woke version of Snow White. Their stock is in the tank as the company finds new ways to insult and lose customers.
The America Conservative Values organization, ranks Disney, Target, Blackrock, Google, and Meta (Facebook) as organizations that have lost potential market share due to pushing progressive values onto unwilling customers.
“The focus of corporations should be on shareholder returns and providing goods and services to consumers, not weighing in on social and political issues which alienate consumers and investors,” said Thomas Carter, president and founder of America Conservative Values ETF (ACVF), which published the survey. “The fact that playing politics alienates investors and customers should be on the minds of CEOs and their boards of directors.”
Government institutions are also failing in the eyes of average Americans, with a new Gallup analysis showing 68% lack confidence in the US government. This places the US behind many of its G7 peers.
Concerningly, our military is seeing the real effects of this, with a drop in public confidence from 90% in 2021 to 81% last year. All branches of the US military are facing critical recruiting failures.
As noted by the Heritage Foundation, military recruiting failures have coincided with the Biden administration’s DEI and progressive agendas rather than building a military to kill bad people and break their stuff.
“Wokeness in the military is being imposed by elected and appointed leaders in the White House, Congress, and the Pentagon who have little understanding of the purpose, character, traditions, and requirements of the institution they are trying to change,” wrote Thomas Spoehr, former Director, Center for National Defense. “Woke ideology undermines military readiness in various ways. It undermines cohesiveness by emphasizing differences based on race, ethnicity, and sex. It undermines leadership authority by introducing questions about whether promotion is based on merit or quota requirements. It leads to military personnel serving in specialties and areas for which they are not qualified or ready. And it takes time and resources away from training activities and weapons development that contribute to readiness.”
There are of course many reasons that a vast number of critical American institutions are failing. Yet the one constant is organizational drift to the left. A focus on progressive ideas that add little to no value to a company’s bottom line or mission.
Our military needs to return to the time-honored values of merit, honor, and character while building the worlds greatest war fighting machine. The military is not a social experiment. Private companies need to leave social policy to others and focus on returns to stockholders. College leaders need to return campuses to order and educate rather than indoctrinate students.
If the elites can’t protect and enhance the critical institutions they are charged with, we need others who can.
