This is what happens when you put Republicans in charge
by digby
Here's a truly scary story about America. The take-over in the states by the Republicans has resulted in a massive reduction in funding for higher education. And it's not because they don't have the money. It's because they want to eliminate higher education. In the 21st century. Because who needs to be educated?
Frank Antenori shot the head off a rattlesnake at his back door last summer — a deadeye pistol blast from 20 feet. No college professor taught him that. The U.S. Army trained him, as a marksman and a medic, on the “two-way rifle range” of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Useful skills. Smart return on taxpayers’ investment. Not like the waste he sees at too many colleges and universities, where he says liberal professors teach “ridiculous” classes and indoctrinate students “who hang out and protest all day long and cry on our dime.”
“Why does a kid go to a major university these days?” said Antenori, 51, a former Green Beret who served in the Arizona state legislature. “A lot of Republicans would say they go there to get brainwashed and learn how to become activists and basically go out in the world and cause trouble.”
Antenori is part of an increasingly vocal campaign to transform higher education in America. Though U.S. universities are envied around the world, he and other conservatives want to reduce the flow of government cash to what they see as elitist, politically correct institutions that often fail to provide practical skills for the job market.
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Antenori views former president Barack Obama, a Harvard-educated lawyer who taught at the University of Chicago Law School, as the embodiment of the liberal establishment. Antenori said liberal elites with fancy degrees who have been running Washington for so long have forgotten those who think differently.
“If you don’t do everything that their definition of society is, you’re somehow a knuckle-dragging Neanderthal cave man,” Antenori said.
Antenori was drawn to Trump, he said, because he was the “reverse of Obama,” an “anti-politically correct guy” whose attitude toward the status quo is “change it, fix it, get rid of it, crush it, slash it.”
Even though Trump boasts of his Ivy League degree from the University of Pennsylvania, Antenori said he “had a different air about him.” Unlike Obama, Trump has not emphasized the importance of Americans going to college.
During the campaign, Trump said many colleges “have gone crazy” and that young people were “choking on debt.” He criticized universities for getting “so much money from the government” while “raising their fees to the point that’s ridiculous.”
Hillary Clinton trounced Trump in the nation’s most educated counties, but Trump won white voters without a college degree by 37 points.
Though Trump has largely ignored higher education during his first year in office, his son Donald Trump Jr. recently excoriated universities during a speech in Texas, for which he was paid $100,000. On college campuses, he said, “Hate speech is anything that says America is a good country. That our founders were great people. That we need borders. Hate speech is anything faithful to the moral teachings of the Bible.”
Trump Jr. went on to say that many universities offer Americans a raw deal: “We’ll take $200,000 of your money; in exchange, we’ll train your children to hate our country. . . . We’ll make them unemployable by teaching them courses in zombie studies, underwater basket weaving and, my personal favorite, tree climbing.”
Antenori, who served as a delegate for Trump at the 2016 National Republican Convention, loves that kind of talk.
Finally, he said, people in power understand how he feels.