I have previously written about the “radical chic” in higher education of faculty members who espouse extremist views in departments purged of conservative, libertarian, or moderate voices. While it is virtually impossible to get departments to seriously consider a mainstream conservative or libertarian, schools like Princeton eagerly hire professors such as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, who recently delighted a Chicago audience with an unhinged rant against the United States and the concept of a nation-state.
Bill Ayers and Princeton’s Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor appeared at a July 4th event and denounced the country and its anniversary.
Taylor thrilled the crowd by recounting her disgust that a woman gave her child an American flag at the airport. She credited herself by not instantly burning it, but went on to denounce the country and credited the audience for its “F**k the U.S.” attitude.
Notably, Taylor suggested that only fools rally behind the flag or the notion of a nation-state. She clearly believes not just in open borders but rejects the very concept of borders. She repeatedly declared that “borders kill” and suggested that patriotic people are simply dupes.
Bill Ayers is a former professor and one of the founders of the domestic terrorist organization, the Weather Underground. His wife, Bernardine Dohrn, was also a member of the group, and both were fugitives for several years. Dohrn is also a professor who has taught at Northwestern University School of Law.
Taylor is a Professor in the Department of African-American Studies at Princeton University. She writes for the New Yorker.
In the Chicago event, Tayler called on others to reject “the idea of loving a nation state, which is what patriotism is.” She repeatedly returned to the theme that borders are “deadly” and “borders kill people.” She explained that we have to erase any borders because they are “a tool of death and destruction.”
Furthermore, she emphasized that the very concept of a nation-state should be the “object of political struggle.”
This reflects the level of intellectual rigor in departments like the one at Princeton. Her writings have been honored by the Marguerite Casey Foundation and Group Health Foundation, the Organization of American Historians, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (which gave her a fellowship).
On one level, the erasure of borders could be viewed as the “withering away of the state” espoused by Friedrich Engels and later by Vladimir Lenin. However, it reads more like the jargonistic narrative common in higher education, where radicals espouse such views without serious challenge from their colleagues.
Even European states that once allowed expanded undocumented migration are now struggling to reverse course due to the high social and security costs. However, academics such as Taylor tell students that we can eradicate any nation-states and live without borders. While most people would expect such views to be espoused by raving lunatics on the subway, Princeton made her a chair professor as the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies.
Her writings are celebrated for her combination of socialism and identity politics. The gushing articles even include praise for her use of emojis. (“All those cry-laughing yellow orbs betrayed a critic with a sense of humor.”).
Few colleagues or critics feel comfortable noting that views like the eradication of the nation-state or erasure of borders are little more than unsupported, jargon-saturated tripe. There is no effort to push her on what happens to an economy without borders where the country (or whatever will replace the nation-state) is responsible for supporting millions of immigrants.
When you hear young socialists in the Mamdani Administration (including Mamdani himself) speaking of “seizing the means of production,” it is the result of college classes taught by figures like Taylor, who offer little more than shallow sound bites and slogans. They have been told that socialism is a successful economic model despite its utter failure historically. It is a fable told by the uninformed to the unquestioning: unicorn economics, eagerly embraced like a bedtime story.
The alternative is what I have called the “liberty-enhancing economy” that the Framers embraced. The combination of political and economic freedom made this republic the greatest engine of prosperity and human rights in history. That does not mean that we do not have difficult economic and social problems. However, the suggestion that we should embrace socialism and erase borders is properly viewed as perfectly bonkers … outside of higher education.
Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the New York Times best-selling author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.”
She wants the whole country to have no doors but I guarantee her classroom has a roster, an add/drop deadline, and someone checking who’s allowed in and who isn’t. Try walking into a Princeton lecture hall without being enrolled and see how open that border is.
That’s the tell. Borders aren’t the problem for people like this. Losing control of the border is the problem, as long as they’re the ones holding it. Her house, her classroom, her tenure committee, all gated. The nation-state just happens to be the one border she doesn’t personally control, so that’s the one that has to go.
Call it what it is. Not a moral stand against borders. A preference for which borders get to exist and who gets to run them.
This is more like Turley looking for pearls to clutch instead of acknowledging that this one speech while provocative is just an expression of a view.
Taylor’s work is actually very good. And her point of view may be controversial but not out of the ordinary for an academic. Turley likes to conflate and mischaracterize a lot when dealing with complex subjects. It makes for easy rage bait for his MAGA illiterates and morons. It sells books.
Dr. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor was not awarded a chaired professorship at Princeton or a Guggenheim Fellowship for “unhinged rants”. She received them for highly rigorous historical scholarship. Her book Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History and won the Freedom Scholars Award. It is a deeply researched economic history of federal housing policy, not “jargon-saturated tripe.”
Extensive sociological research (such as studies by sociologists Neil Gross and Ethan Fosse) shows that the political imbalance in academia is primarily due to self-selection. Liberal-leaning individuals are statistically far more likely to pursue low-paying, multi-year Ph.D. paths in the humanities and social sciences. In contrast, conservative-leaning individuals disproportionately choose higher-paying, private-sector careers in business, corporate law, finance, and engineering.
Conservatives are not being “purged”. They choose to not be in academia when they can get more money in the private sector. It’s a choice, not a forced ejection from academia.
Turley’s claim that radical left-wing scholars operate ‘without serious challenge from their colleagues’ misunderstands the brutal nature of academic peer review and tenure. He should know. Academic culture is notoriously combative, and radical theories face intense structural pushback from mainstream liberal and centrist faculty members daily. You know that pesky thing he loves to promote….the free exchange of ideas and different points of view.
The very thingTurley criticizes—academic tenure—was designed to protect faculty from being fired for holding unpopular or radical views. It protects conservative professors writing original originalists briefs just as much as it protects leftist professors criticizing the nation-state.
This goes to show Turley just likes to post these mischaracterizations into something they are not just to rage-bait MAGA illiterates and morons more content on conspiracy theories and leftist bashing than real intellectual debate.
Hitler, Napoleon, Caesar, the Mongols and the Huns also did not believe in borders. They believed in war and conquest. Borders are protected zealously to prevent the struggles for power that we call wars.
In the socialist, borderless paradise envisioned by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, I wonder if those who write her paychecks ever think about letting her know that by far the lion’s share of the money contributed to Yale’s huge endowment (the income from which pays her salary) comes from very wealthy individuals and organizations. True, the university has many smaller donors but added together they make up a very, very small part of the total contributions. It is easy for someone with a regular paycheck guaranteed by tenure with no apparent limitations on behavior to call for the destruction of that which makes her career possible. Why not put Yale’s money where Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s mouth is? Allow her salary to come only from donations made by those who have crossed the border illegally or who are low income workers, and divide that amount among all of those professors who applauded her so vigorously. Then she might be worth listening to.
Instead of Yale it should be Princeton but they all are the same it seems.
I agree that she, and her followers and colleagues, should move to another country. Why do they want to change ours? There is a lot of room in Canada and Cuba needs their beliefs to repair all the poverty there.
Come On Man! The name of Professor Whacky says it all!! The He/She/It/They/Them/Whatever has a hard on for HATING the racist, supremist, misogynistic patriarchy that is the ONLY Democracy that would let IT do IT’s own thing!!! And of course modern ChiTown also indicates the land of IDIOCY! Well just gotta let whack jobs be Unicorns!!! Haha.
Lah-de-dah. Welcome to another day in the leftist land of hatered for all things bright and beautiful.
Dear Mr. Turley, I agree with whimsicalmama. It is my hope that this “professor” will be sent packing to North Korea. They would enjoy her so much!!
Agreed and Dohrn and Ayers should be sent back to prison for their role in the Weathermen terror group killings and bombings of the 60’s. Another Predator Bill Clinton, terrorist pardon.
HEY GOP…end all Federal Aid to colleges!
Stop rewarding democrat who hate America
You know she obtained her position in a pseudo academic discipline based on traits unrelated to any intellectual achievement She is another vacuous indoctrinator at a prestigious university who rose through academia mastering the snake oil of their debased ideology. I just received my alumni magazine from U of Penn extolling the brilliance of a PhD student in Musicology who cannot read music and whose dissertation topic is “Cassette Tapes” That is what passes for research in the the liberal arts academy in elite universities
One of her books argues that banks and the real estate industry have destroyed black home ownership. It would have been helpful to see links to criticism by economic historians of her methods and conclusions. Much of Thomas Sowell’s work has focused on the misuse of economic data to score ideological points.
But a rant against her speech at a rally is not enough to discredit her scholarship, in my view. Poor it may be, but this article does not provide any evidence.
After Mugabe seized the white farms in Zimbabwe, famine followed. Why do communists think if they seize the means of production everything will be okey dokey? People that sign the back of a paycheck haven’t a clue of what the person that signs the front of the check knows. When people who are not qualified to run a lemonade stand, get elected to public office and have to run things they blame their failures on others. Maybe the comrade needs to spend their holidays picking potatoes?
“Why do communists think if they seize the means of production everything will be okey dokey?”
Communists for decades have argued that their theory is perfect, the ideal. That communism’s failings — famine, censorship, secret police — are all caused by bad people. That they just need some fresh faces — like the one in NYC with the smile of an assassin.
These people know that their theories will work if they just kill enough people. Stalin what 30 million, Mao 80 million. That wasn’t quite enough, but hey let’s just keep trying.
Unchecked, unpublicized high school and university instructors and the administrators who hire them with no counter balance are responsible.
There is accountability written into the first amendment. It is the free press – which includes all of us – who can report and tell the world what individuals an dorganizations say and do with their sacred freedom of speech.
I can’t believe that Prof Turley can’t think and argue at a higher level than this. He writes like his audience has an IQ of 85, and I bet that is because that is his assessment.
Strangely, the Founding Fathers put few protections for property in the Constitution, and I doubt that was a mistake. We could vote ourselves into socialism with no problem. A hybrid system is probably much better, allowing wealth to accumulate once everyone has a basic level of support. But a democratic change towards socialism will be the inevitable result if the wealthy refuse to share. They use crony capitalism and non-productive financial games to gain a large part of their wealth and that WILL be rolled back. Hopefully they are smart enough to allow that to be done peacefully.
The standards completely change. It is ok to attack countries to secure their wealth, but it is not ok for people to fight for resources within their own country? Violence is wrong unless it serves you? Lawfare is wrong unless it is against YOUR enemies? Extreme speech is only wrong when it is addressed to the powerful? The MAGA movement has lost all intellectual grounding.
Speaking of a sub-85 IQ:
“. . . the Founding Fathers put few protections for property in the Constitution . . .” “We could vote ourselves into socialism with no problem.”
The Constitution is not a comprehensive list of rights. It is not a charter granting permissions to the individual. It is a check and a limit on the power of government. Government can do that only which the Constitution expressly permits.
If you understood the nature and purpose of our Constitution, your observation would be:
The Founders did not grant government any power to realize the socialist dream of seizing private property. (And that includes 5A.)
So, a radical, lesbian raised by radicalized parents says that she hates the US. Tell me why she lives in the US? If she hates it so much, why not move to some nation that shares her hatred of us. She can hate us at a distance and not be sucking her livelihood from the US taxpayers through the use of taxpayer funding for her university seat.
This is the same mindset as those that complain that the government is not doing enough for the poor while they have millions in the bank and reap the benefits that this country provides them. Cheap talk and pandering to make themselves look good and a part of the elite class. This was on full view with the “movie stars” 4th of July’s propaganda hate Trump response.
To the rest of the population, they would be appear more sincere and taken seriously if they put their own money where their mouth says the government (taxpayers) should.
While the likes of Bezos, Musk, Trump, Swift and others in that $ circle provide jobs, services and products, I feel that they could do more with their personal $. There is a great need for mental health, veteran’s services, homelessness, parks and open spaces. Do they really need that $500 million boat? Why not support a veteran’s village. After all the veteran’s of America have enabled this country and their businesses to succeed.
It’s time to help these Commies decide it’s best for their health to remove themselves out of our country.
I remember when the “F” word was considered so very inappropriate that only the most uneducated and boorish of people would use the word in public–never a lady (especially!) or a gentleman. Now there’s not a day goes by when I don’t see it in print–or hear it. The gasps when encountering that terrible word aren’t heard very often anymore, I’m afraid, but it doesn’t make the “F” word any less uncivilized than it’s always been. The Princeton professor and the crowd she lauded should be ashamed of herself and itself.
Boy you get to the heart of the matter.
Liberals hate everything, but mostly the self.
What a deep analysis! And you hate words? arguments? reasons? thinking in general?
Self loathing on steroids!