Professor John Ellis discusses how American universities became 'one-party campuses'
John Ellis, professor at University of California, Santa Cruz joins Mark Levin on 'Life, Liberty & Levin.'
This is a rush transcript from "Life, Liberty & Levin," June 21, 2020. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
MARK LEVIN, HOST: Hello America, I'm Mark Levin. This is "Life, Liberty & Levin."
See this? This is my mostly peaceful protest. I'm sick and tired of this country being torn down. I'm sick and tired of hearing from people in the streets about how awful our history is.
I'm sick and tired of pampered multimillionaire athletes telling us about systemic racism. I'm sick and tired of the media, which just repeats the same propaganda as the left, and so our millions and millions of you.
We are hardworking Americans. We are good people. We've gone all over the globe to protect people. We have people all over the globe right now who are putting their life on the line to protect people of different religions, different races, liberty.
I'm sick and tired of our flag being disrespected, of the National Anthem being disrespected. Three members of my family fought in World War II, three of them. They're my heroes, not Colin Kaepernick, a third rate quarterback.
Two members of my family served in the Philadelphia Police Force. They're all gone now, and they served honorably. I stand with the cops, not against the cops.
I don't stand with anybody who is a racist or anybody who has a bad anything, whether they're lawyers, or doctors or professors or teachers, whether they're media people or cops.
But this is a great society. It's an imperfect society, but it is a great society. This flag is my peaceful, mostly peaceful protest, and that's why it sits right here and nobody is going to knock it off either.
Take a knee. Now, we're being told, oh, no, no, taking a knee has nothing to do with the military. It has nothing to do with the flag. Don't hey me that. We're pulling down monuments, whether or not they're part of the Confederacy or part of the Union, we're trashing monuments, Abraham Lincoln, and Washington and all of the others.
This is an attack on the core values and principles of this society.
Nothing less. And we, the people, need to stand up to this and we need to object to this because this doesn't represent the vast majority of Americans. Period.
It does represent the vast majority of the media and academia and students, but not the rest of America. That's a fact.
And so tonight, what I decided to do is look at two areas that I think are crucial. One is academia, and the other is the media with two really outstanding scholars. And the first gentleman I want to introduce you do, distinguished Professor Emeritus of German Literature, University of California, Santa Cruz, John Ellis.
He has written a magnificent book, "The Breakdown of Higher Education." It couldn't be more timely. He is Chairman of the California Association of Scholars.
Professor Ellis, I want to welcome you and I want to read to the audience, just to lay this out, and then throw it to you -- one of the paragraphs at the beginning of your first chapter of your outstanding book.
You're right, "The assault on free expression in the public sphere is best regarded as a relatively superficial symptom of much larger problems that need to be understood and dealt with before we will ever be able to restore genuine respect for freedom of speech on our campuses."
"If tomorrow every campus in the nation were to start ensuring that visiting speakers are never again shouted down, the underlying sickness of higher education would remain untouched."
"We cannot understand the nature of the sickness until we ask, why is free speech constantly under threat on the campuses? Why do shout downs and near riots now occur with such regularity? These questions lead to the broader subject of how higher education has been so thoroughly corrupted and diverted from its real purpose."
This book came out this year, but before the mostly peaceful protests and the riots that we've seen in the last couple of weeks, so let me throw it to you. What exactly are you talking about that's taking place on our college campuses?
JOHN ELLIS, DISTINGUISHED PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF GERMAN LITERATURE, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA-SANTA CRUZ: Well, what I'm talking about is the fact that the public sees the shout downs and the near riots with regard to visiting speakers, but it doesn't think about how that could happen. And the reason it happens, of course, is you've got students largely doing it in those cases, but they're taught by radical professors.
So that the real source of the problem is not the shout downs, the source of the problem is in the classrooms where those kids learn their contempt for ideas that don't fit with what their professors are teaching them.
So, you're seeing a superficial symptom. The real problem is way behind the scenes in the classrooms, which the public never sees.
LEVIN: And the faculty it strikes me, Professor, if you disagree, let me know, it is very incestuous. When you have faculty members hiring faculty members, many from the same universities, many of the same ideology.
You can see today you have certain faculty members that don't fit in with the hard left ideology. They're being pushed out of the universities, they're being boycotted by the students. They are under all kinds of pressure and threats. How did it come to be?
How did he come to be that what we used to talk about academic freedom really doesn't exist, and we have really one ideological mindset at this point?
ELLIS: Well, you've had a very long campaign of converting the universities into one party campuses. I mean, if you go back 50 years, studied on by a county commission in 1969, there were three left of center professors to two right of center professors.
Now, by the end of the century in 1999, another study finds that ratio of three to two, which is very mild -- and three to two, that's consistent with a very healthy debate between the left and the right on campus.
But by the end of the century, 1999, a study shows five to one, so you got a very great concentration building up. By another five to six years later, it's gone to eight to one, and the current studies being done coming out now, so something like 13 to one.
Now, there's every reason to believe that that's getting more extreme all the time because one of these studies look to the junior ranks, let's say the recent appointees -- assistant professors, associate professors -- had found that the ratio there, left to right is 48 to one.
So, in other words, the hiring being done now is at the rate of about 50 to one, not five to one or eight to one. So you're going to wind up with a complete monoculture within a short period of time.
Now, everyone can see, anyone with a brain can see that's very unhealthy.
You can't have a serious debate about the issues of the day when one party is missing.
Now, what I find really, really strange about this is this. That everyone can see that it's wrong, that it is unhealthy, and no one does a thing to stop it. So, the campus is full of people -- professors, administrators -- who see this happening and they don't lift a finger to stop, they are progressing towards a complete one party campus.
And one party campus is a campus that's dysfunctional.
LEVIN: When Bernie Sanders says we would have free college, everybody ought to go to college. I've got the thinking, why does he want everybody to go to college? Is it because these have become indoctrination and brainwashing mills with groupthink? I think so.
And when I watched the so-called peaceful part of the mostly peaceful protests, I see what appeared to me to be a lot of college students, probably some college professors, probably some members of the NEA and the AFT, as far as I can tell, since school is out and it's been around for a very, very long time.
What are these professors as an aggregate, what are they teaching them about economics? What are they teaching them about history? Is it similar to "The New York Times" project that America began in 1619 with slavery and that's in our DNA? And there's not a damn thing we can do about it? Is that the kind of indoctrination that's going on?
ELLIS: It is indeed. I mean, I think you can bet on the fact that most of the almost insane left radical left ideas that are floating to the surface in the wider world now come ultimately from the campus.
The campus is -- the campus is so far left and so irrational now, and it's leftism that is poisoning the culture. One profession after another is being essentially corrupted.
LEVIN: And you know, Professor, I happen to know a few young people who are going to universities. One of them is a law student, one of them is a medical student, one of them is an undergraduate student, and they all told me, if they don't keep their politics, they're not necessarily concerned, but they're not radical left.
If they don't keep their politics to themselves, they are literally shunned. They were literally shunned or worse, they're not invited to any events. You know, it's just -- and we keep funding these institutions.
There's really no oversight. They have massive endowments from corporations and nonprofit organizations.
Congress never looks at them. State legislatures never look at them. And they have enormous costs as they keep expanding and getting bigger and bigger. There has to be some kind of oversight on this or some kind of competition, don't you think?
ELLIS: Yes, well, that's the problem. The academia is a very fad and fashion driven place. I mean, you can bet that if a new politically correct folly arises on one campus, it'll spread to the other campuses very rapidly, so you don't have competition in the sense that you have, you know, a rational institution competing with an irrational institution. They all essentially adopt the same irrationality very quickly.
Now, restoring competitions can be a very difficult thing to do. Precisely, because the contagion spreads throughout the academia so rapidly, but if you have a one party campus -- that is by definition, an irrational campus.
You cannot have a one party system that stays sane.
My favorite quote on this is John Stuart Mill, who said that you'll always need -- to have a healthy political state, you'll always need a party of order and stability on the one hand, and a party of progress and reform on the other. And then he said, that it's precisely the opposition of the one to the other that keeps each one of them within the bounds of reason and sanity.
Now, that would stand. That's strong language. What he is really saying is, you take away one of those parties, which is what you've done on university campuses. You take one party away, and the other one goes insane for lack of a discipline of having to answer to the arguments of the other.
And that's where we are, we have a completely irrational campus, and there's no end I sight. If anything, it's getting worse, as the ratio of left to right professors increases. And we've reached a point now where even though there's still a few left, most of them are intimidated and stay silent and you see the occasional example of one that doesn't stay silent, and he is usually made an example of, which keeps the others quiet.
LEVIN: So, we don't have academic freedom. We don't have free speech. The taxpayers keep subsidizing this. Parents keep subsidizing this, and maybe we taxpayers and parents ought to start taking a look at this.
We'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
LEVIN: Welcome back. Professor Ellis, before the break, I was talking about we seem to be subsidizing our own demise from within here, whether it's our Federal and state tax dollars going into these schools, whether it's parents paying tuition, or even other people paying tuition, and you send your kids into these schools, and many of them come out quite differently, ideologically.
Why do we keep doing this? And is there something else we can do about it?
ELLIS: Well, you're right. I mean, the part of the problem is that old habits die hard. I mean, the parents have a very fixed attitude, derived from the past, that sending their kids to college is a first rate way to launch them into a life and a career, and then there's the fact that those great names of the institutions of higher learning of Harvard, Yale, Columbia, the magnificent buildings, it is everything that is very, very impressive.
It casts a kind of spell over the public. They really cannot believe at the bottom that what was so glorious is now in fact no longer there. Now, there are some signs, though, that the public is changing its attitude. There was a study done with the total number of kids in higher education, nine years ago 2011.
There were 20.5 million students in higher education. Today, that number is down to 17.5 million. But if you're just for the increase in population, actually, that should be -- I mean, the gain -- there should have been a gain from 20.5 to 21.5 million. So, there are four million students missing, so it is true that the public is becoming more skeptical.
But the simple outline of the situation is this, the parents through tuition, students through the indebtedness they get through life in college, donors, and then state legislatures all contribute vast sums of money between them to higher education and they're not getting it.
What's happening instead is that that's -- a large amount of that, not all of it by any means, but a good chunk of that money, the majority of it is an involuntary campaign contribution to the radical left.
Now, the public has to wake up and realize that it is paying lots of money to support something it doesn't want to support and the state legislators need to get busy on, you know, looking very seriously whether the appropriations that they make for the purpose of funding higher education whether they're really supporting higher education or not.
LEVIN: And of course, Professor, if you dare to touch it, they say you're attacking academic freedom which of course, this ideology is destroying.
Now, this ideology we're talking about, I'll just lay it out, you can tell me whether you agree or disagree. It is -- if it's not flat out, Marxism, it's some version of it.
I mean, when I see the protesters in the street, what they're talking about, we have to burn down what exists. Now everything that exists, the President must go, the history must go. Pull down the statues, chisel out the names, and then we'll start new.
I mean, that's like -- that comes right out of the Communist Manifesto, destroy the society that exists, the family, the churches and everything else, and start with a clean slate. Is that what they're being taught?
ELLIS: Well, I'm afraid so. Some of the professors doing this actually call themselves Marxist, probably something like a quarter of them, at least in some areas. I mean, Sociology, for example, certainly that's true.
Some preach what are essentially Marxist ideas, but wouldn't call themselves Marxist. They'll call themselves socialists or activists. But the end result is certainly the majority opinion on campuses now is to remake this society into something it isn't.
To abolish the current cap what they call capitalist system -- intelligent people call it a free market system -- and to remake it in the image that these radicals have.
Now, if you ask them what that image is, you start to get very vague replies because, in fact, once you describe the conditions in a socialist country, they know very well that that doesn't go over very well, but there is really an animus against way the country is and has been for some time, and the radical left is seizing the opportunity now to press its case, and it has essentially taken over the academic world.
I mean, it is now a boot camp for political radicalism. It is no longer a place that prepares children to confront the careers that are facing them, the lives that are facing them with the mental equipment, to face new challenges, to analyze new situations, to respond to new challenges that they face. That's not happening.
I mean, when a political activist tells you to get in line behind them and join the cause, higher education is stopped dead. There's no development of mental capacity involved in that, on the contrary, it is the other way around.
The political radicals are telling you to stop thinking, just do as you're told.
LEVIN: Well, you know, Professor, society can't survive very long when its children and grandchildren are taught to hate it. They hate every bit of it.
ELLIS: Yes.
LEVIN: And this has become ubiquitous, not only in universities and colleges, but you can see it in the media. You can see it in Hollywood. You have people who live in the lap of luxury in this society, whatever the race is, whatever their background is who claim to be joining these revolutionary movements, it's almost chic. It's almost the cool thing to do.
And so what we're doing, I think you'll agree is we're losing the culture, the whole culture, the whole notion of America, do you agree with that?
ELLIS: I'm afraid so. The academia is poisoning one profession after another. It's totally poisoned journalism. It's poisoned the teaching in the high schools because the high school teachers are all trained on college campuses, and we -- the society needs to wake up and decide whether it really wants to pay these vast sums of money to support this apparatus.
Now, I mean, one has to face the fact that the one party campus is made precisely because those ideas don't stand up to challenge very well.
If the radicals allowed a healthy debate on campus, they lose. They always lose. So, the only way they can actually win is by shutting out people with other ideas, and that's what they're doing.
And the public has to throw off the spell created by the great names of Harvard and Columbia and face the fact that that's the past. The present is quite different.
LEVIN: Yes, I agree. Maybe great names like Hillsdale, Grove City and some of the others should be talking about this.
Professor Ellis, fantastic book, "The Breakdown of Higher Education,"
crucially important, and I want to thank you for your bravery and coming on this program. God bless you.
ELLIS: Well, thank you very much for having me on.
LEVIN: We'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
ASHLEY STROHMIER, FOX NEWS CHANNEL CORRESPONDENT: Live from "America's News Headquarters," I'm Ashley Strohmier. A spike in coronavirus infections as the U.S. adds more than 31,000 new cases on Saturday. The total number nationwide now stands at more than 2.2 million with almost 120,000 deaths.
While the New York area has been able to flatten the curve and the daily death toll is down, outside of the epicenter, hotspots are emerging all over the country in places like Florida, Georgia and Arizona.
And 11 people were hurt and one killed in an overnight shooting in Minneapolis. Witnesses at the scene say at least two groups of people were shooting at one another. Although the motive and suspects remain unknown, the violence took place in the uptown section of Minneapolis. That's a popular destination with bars and restaurants.
I'm Ashley Strohmier, now back to LIFE, LIBERTY & LEVIN.
LEVIN: Welcome back. We've covered half of the problem. Maybe more than half. Maybe there's many parts of the problem, but that is academia and the ubiquitous ideological sort of brainwashing that's going on and how it affects the entirety of society.
The other half of this is the media such as it is, and there's nobody better, Tim Groseclose is a Professor of Economics at George Mason University, Adam Smith Chair at the Mercatus Center, and he has written a fantastic book, and I even cite it in my book, "Unfreedom of the Press."
It's called, "Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind." And in part, here's what he says. "What happens when our view of the world is filtered through the eyes, ears and minds of such a liberal group?"
He says, "As I demonstrate using objective social scientific methods, the filtering prevents us from seeing the world as it actually is. Instead, we see only a distorted version of it. It is as if we see the world through a glass -- a glass that magnifies the facts that liberals want us to see and shrinks the facts that conservatives want us to see."
He writes later, "Perhaps worst of all, media bias feeds on itself. That is the bias makes us more liberal, which makes us less able to detect the bias, which allows the media to get away with more bias, which makes us even more liberal and so on."
"All of this means that the political views that we currently see in Americans are not their natural views. We see only an artificial, distorted version of those views."
Professor, welcome, and let me suggest to you, I'd like your take on this, that it's worse now than ever, particularly given the fact that we have a Donald Trump as our President. Do you agree?
TIM GROSECLOSE, PROFESSOR OF ECONOMICS, GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY: I agree.
Completely. Yes. His whole point about Tom Cotton, you remember when "The New York Times" said no, we can't run that op-ed.
You remember who protested? It wasn't the opinion writers of "The New York Times," it was the journalists, it was the news writers.
The point in my book is I asked the thought experiment. Suppose you read the content from journalists and you ask yourself the question, what if instead of being -- knowing that it a news story, what if instead you thought this was a speech by politician. What would you guess is the ideology of that would be politician?
And one thing I found in my book, I said, it's about all the mainstream media's to the left, but not quite as left as a mainstream Democrat. What "The New York Times" journalists did, I would argue was even left -- more left than what the average Democrats in Congress are doing.
Just watch anytime on C-SPAN whenever there's a major Bill, Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, whenever they introduce a Bill, the Democrats will have say, two hours for the debate, the first thing they will do is say I give half of my time to the Republicans.
"The New York Times" journalist, that was just beyond the pale for them to even think of giving any time to someone like Tom Cotton. So, I would argue "The New York Times" journalists, definitely, although maybe when I wrote my book, they acted not quite as left as the average Democrat in Congress.
Now, they are acting even more left than the average Democrat in Congress.
LEVIN: But doesn't that underscore one of the points in your book, which is this is self-fulfilling, self-generating, and so it gets worse and worse and worse, less in terms of diversity of viewpoints, less in terms of tolerance, and much more ideological.
GROSECLOSE: Yes, I agree. So, if people are getting their information from the mainstream media, they have no idea what's going on, on the other side.
One little anecdote on this, so there's a scholar named John McWhorter, who is a Professor at Columbia University. I would call him something of a right leaning moderate. He is an African-American man and he wrote about the police killings, and he said, yes, I'm not sure the police are racist, but where are the names of the white people being killed? He said, you know, I think there really is a problem.
After he said that though, people sent in, here are the white people killed and he got this list and he said, wow, I didn't know of this because we only hear about the black people that are killed.
And sure enough, some of us have been reporting these statistics by "The Washington Post."
"The Washington Post" has gathered this database from 2015-2019 of all the police killings and you look at these numbers, and it's actually white people have been killed, of all the police killings, about 50 percent are white, only about 25 percent are black. But the news is incredibly disproportionate, you only see the black killings.
So, if your information only came from the mainstream media, you would think only black people are being killed by the police, when that's not the case at all.
So I argue, that was one more example of how the media bias just --
LEVIN: Let me just interrupt you there, and what the statistics also show is that police are not running around killing people. So, we need to be clear about that because of this movement now that's talking about disbanding police and so forth.
The people who are running around killing people are the people in the streets, people in neighborhoods, people in communities who are running around killing people, as a matter of fact, but the police are not running around killing people.
And back to your book, so we have this false reality that's fed to us each and every day, Congress acts on it. They can't act fast enough. They want to create new holidays. They want to they want to nationalize local policing, the fact that these cities are run by hardcore leftwing Democrats and many of these states are as well and they take no responsibility for it whatsoever.
How does the average person out there get factual information? They're certainly not getting it from so-called newsrooms in this country, Professor?
GROSECLOSE: Yes. Part of my book is to try to actually give numbers that say like, this is the extent to which this media outlet is left or this is the extent which this media outlet is right and I put numbers on these.
And so lots of people say, oh, if you just watch Fox News, balance it out with MSNBC. Part of the point of my book is that's not quite true, and at least, now I was limited in the data I had, but I analyzed only one Fox News show and this was "Special Report" at the time Brit Hume was still the anchor, and I found that yes, that show was rightward leaning, that it had anything a conservative bias.
But its conservative bias was less, something like about half of the liberal bias of the mainstream media. So, to put some numbers on this, I found "New York Times" was about 25 points biased to the left, whereas "Special Report" was only about eight points bias to the right.
So, if you wanted a balanced set of news, what it means is you would have to watch "Special Report" about three times, devote about three times as many minutes to "Special Report" as you were to "The New York Times" if you wanted to get a perfectly balanced version of the news.
LEVIN: When we come back, my question to you is this, that's "The New York Times," CNN, MSNBC to me -- I don't break it down the way you do with your with your models, it is a never ending drumbeat. I want to see if you agree with me on that.
We'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
LEVIN: Professor Groseclose, I made the point that really it's a steady drumbeat on some of these networks, and it's much like college campuses, I think. There's very little diversity of thinking. Am I wrong or am I right?
GROSECLOSE: Yes, you're definitely right, especially after Trump. And that's one thing that for good or bad, Trump helped expose it.
I think it used to be that the mainstream media would say, no, no, no, we're balanced. But after Trump, they would say, no, no, no, of course we're not balanced. We have to oppose Trump. That's what we should do.
That's the proper and moral thing to do. So, at least now they admit it.
LEVIN: But what about this diversity in newsrooms? I mean, I don't see a hell of a lot. I mean, I can't name -- I can name a bunch of leftwing hosts and big time contributors. Basically, what I see when it comes to some of these networks is they'll sort of have a dancing conservative go across the stage every now and then. But that's about it, just for show.
And what is -- what can be done about this? I mean, these are private corporations.
GROSECLOSE: Yes, what can be done? Now, that's a hard one. The diversity isn't there, that is true. So the best statistics. The newsroom -- if national media has anything to do with politics, it'll be about 93 to seven. That's what the surveys say about it.
Yes, the journalist -- how you voted in the last election, 93 percent of the Democrats, only seven percent for the Republican. I think that seven percent is actually a little bit artificially high. And I explained it in my book, if journalists are lying, even a small degree to the survey, to the pollsters that seven percent is going to be too high.
If you look at campaign contributions, the number is more like two or three percent. So a newsroom is only about two or three percent of people who vote Republican.
Here's how high or how low that number is. So, here's one example. If you watch "The View" on ABC, you watch "The Five."
LEVIN: By the way, but go ahead.
GROSECLOSE: Okay. "The View," I can't remember her name, John McCain's daughter. She is the one conservative --
LEVIN: Meghan.
GROSECLOSE: Against four liberals, okay, and it is so unfair when you watch the debate, I can't stand to watch it. Now that number -- those numbers are four to one.
Now, to get what would actually be in a mainstream newsroom, it would be more like 12 to one. So take "The View," take all those four liberals, clone them two times. So you get 12 liberals versus that one Meghan McCain.
That would be what a typical newsroom would be like, and if I'm right about that seven percent number, it is exaggerated, it is more like 40 to one something like that.
So in a newsroom, it is just overwhelmingly left. What can be done about it? I'm not sure, except, I think that people are onto it. I think that the average voter no longer thinks "The New York Times" is the paper of record, that it is fair and balanced.
Like they've realized, it is the voice of the left, and I think because of this or some other factors just in the news industry, I think a lot of these mainstream outlets are just going to start dying off.
Now, it's going to take a long time. I've calculated the half-life of journalists out of mainstream newsrooms as something like 15 or 20 years.
So, if you go out 15 years, the New York Times will have only half its journalists, 30, a quarter and so on. So it will gradually, gradually wither away.
But I think it's going to be here for a while, and I don't quite have any answer what to do about it, except maybe if we can just make people aware of the bias, and then at least then moderate voters and conservatives, they'll say, well, there is a bias to the left, but at least we can discount it.
I can know that they are not telling me the whole truth. I think that's about the best that we can do.
LEVIN: When we come back, my question, Professor is this. Do we actually have a free press in America? I don't mean government interference. There's not that, but do we actually have a free press in America?
We'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
LEVIN: Welcome back. Professor Groseclose, do we have a free press in this country?
GROSECLOSE: Well, in the strictest sense, yes. I don't think government is quite getting involved. But there is a self-censorship, a mob censorship.
I'm not sure what and I never would have imagined a non-government entity could do this.
If you are a conservative, the poor Bret Stevens, people like -- I tried to write at "The New York Times" -- I'm sure they are so -- the pure pressure on them to squelch their views and not report the whole truth is just amazing. I see it in academia, as a professor, I see it there are some things you just won't dare say.
A Professor at University of Chicago just lost his job, or at least was being pressured to quit as the as the editor of the "Journal of Political Economy." Basically, all he did was he wrote a tweet criticizing -- basically only saying that he was against Black Lives Matter.
There was a mob that rose up against him. I have a feeling, I won't say his career is over, but his career will be hurt for that. Everyone kind of understands this. Everyone is walking on pins and needles, at least in academia and I have a feeling in journalism, at least at the mainstream presses.
So given that, yes, there is no freedom of the press. The one hope, there are things like talk radio. We saw Fox News. There still are few outlets out there.
I used to say that the internet and social media is going to be a savior. I think that Andrew Breitbart was saying things like that. I am very skeptical about Twitter. I am on Twitter. I will sometimes write tweets and then I'm -- something fishy is going on.
I will look up my tweets in the search engine and then I can't find them and I've talked to other conservatives, the same thing is happening.
There's talk of shadow banning. I think something weird is going on at Twitter. I think something at Facebook, Google something similar is going on.
So given that, the social media is not allowing us to have a free press, so even though strictly speaking, the government is not cracking down, it is these other forces, which I would not have imagined 20 years ago and I think it is, we are in a sad situation.
LEVIN: I think the radical progressives or I call them statists, they have done a hell of a job at devouring academia. They've done a hell of a job of devouring the media from which academia come. When you look at journalist schools or professors, people come to mind like Jay Rosen, and that that whole breed of thinking that is your social activists. You need to advance a cause.
John Dewey, a hundred years ago, same thing. You've got to change education and media to advance a social agenda and so forth. It has taken hold in this country in a big, big way, and so these institutions of higher education, academic freedom, there's very little academic freedom, there's very little free speech.
You expect the media rather than joining in and the attack in the Covington students and so forth, standing up for free speech, standing up for civil liberties -- they don't do it.
When you look at the Russia collusion that took place, when you have the F.B.I. going into a campaign and when you have other things going on, rather than reporting on it, they're participating in it.
So, this is why I say we don't have a free press. Of course, we have a free press in the sense that the government is not slapping down media organizations, although Obama did that and FDR did that, and Woodrow Wilson did that.
No, what we have is the complete lack of, in my view, of professionalism, of diversity of viewpoints, and what the founders had in mind when we got our First Amendment in the first place.
Professor Groseclose, I want to thank you very much, and I want to thank you for your excellent book, "Left Turn," and I want to strongly recommend that people take a look at it. "How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind." Thank you, Professor.
And we'll be right back.
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LEVIN: Welcome back. I want to remind you because it needs reminding.
America is a great country and Americans are a great people. It is we, who defeated the Third Reich. It is we who defeated Tojo. It is we who defeated the Soviet Union. It is we who are a beacon for liberty all around the world.
There's a reason why people around the world want to come to this country.
People of color want to come to this country. People have been abused by their cultures all over the world, they want to come here for a reason.
If we are systemically racist, if the police are systemically beating up people, if we are this horrible country that we're being told day in and day out from the left, well then why do people want to come here?
And the hard left, it is a counter revolution against this country and they have a political party that is the vessel through which they operate. It's the Democratic Party, anti-Americanism; whether it's during the Civil War between the Civil War in the 1960s and today can be found mostly where -- I'm telling you the truth, in the Democratic Party.
The Democratic Party is the counter revolutionary party against the American Revolution.
We should embrace our liberty. We should embrace our Constitution, because that is what stands between us and tyranny, and I don't give a damn what football players and NBA players have to say, or their Commissioners.
I don't give a damn what overpaid media personalities at CNN have to say about it either, and I sure as hell don't give a damn about a presidential candidate who sits in his basement all day, like he's in a padded cell, pushing out statements left and right, that suddenly you and I are supposed to genuflect to.
This is a great country. We know it. Never forget it. Push back.
I'll see you next time on "Life, Liberty & Levin."
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