David McElroy

What if the whole system of college education in this country is mostly a scam? What if it’s a system that sucks untold billions of dollars out of our pockets, but provides very little in tangible value?

I felt that college was an absolute waste of time and money for me. There were a very few classes in which I learned things that felt worth the time and effort. (Thank you, Dr. Pound.) For the most part, I was jumping through hoops that didn’t matter. I learned almost everything that mattered (and absolutely everything I ever learned related to journalism) by doing the work, not by sitting in a class.

For a long time, I wondered if it was just me. Everybody else seemed to assume that a college degree was great and gave them a golden ticket for life. In the years since then, though, it seems as though more and more people are questioning this system.

Zachary Caceres has a new article at the Radical Social Entrepreneurs website that should make you question the value of traditional colleges — even elite colleges. It’s about how a Google engineer and ex-Stanford University professor is shaking up the world of higher education. (Read the article. It’s worth it.)

Last year, Sebastian Thrun was teaching a graduate-level class at Stanford about artificial intelligence. (Thrun is the man behind Google’s self-driving car, so he knows a thing or two about the subject.) He became frustrated that he was only reaching 200 students in one location, so he did something unprecedented. He sent out one announcement that he was offering the same lectures, quizzes and tests to anyone, for free. His simple offer found 160,000 takers.

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For more than 30 years, the Christian Right has been vilified for forcing its socially conservative views on the country. Starting with Rev. Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority and then moving along to Rev. Pat Robertson and the Christian Coalition, these groups had a tremendous influence on getting conservative Republicans elected, both nationally and in countless GOP primaries where the candidates were forced to fight over who was most conservative.

All along the way, Democrats and those on the political left have bemoaned the mixing of politics and religion. For more than 20 years, I’ve agreed with them at every step along the way on that point. I hated the way the Religious Right tried to use government power to force everyone to behave in their personal lives according to their own socially conservative agenda. And I hated the hypocrisy of fighting battles for allegedly Christian motives, but with tactics that would have sometimes made the devil blush with envy.

After years of telling the Christian Right how wrong it was to force its views on other people, the Christian Left has a new tactic. They’ve decided to organize politically to force their religious views on the rest of us, too.

The political organization is called Christians for Change. (You can see their promo video below.) They’ve been organized as a “Super PAC” by a group called The Christian Left. They’re not about saving souls or personally helping anybody. The group is unabashedly planning to try to force a progressive left agenda on the country.

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Since at least the 1960s, the John Birch Society has been fighting a lonely battle to get the United States to pull out of the United Nations and kick the UN out of New York City. If you don’t know anything about the John Birchers, they’re an interesting bunch. They’ve always believed in a world of conspiracies and communists under every rock. When it comes to the UN, though, it just might be that the Birchers had it right from the start.

The United Nations is now calling for confiscating wealth from the “super rich” in relatively prosperous countries in order to send it to poor countries. It’s not an income tax. The proposal is to confiscate 1 percent of the wealth of billionaires. It’s simple theft of an estimated $400 billion in order to send it to corrupt and repressive governments that have run their people into the ground.

I’m not worried about alleged conspiracies for a “new world order” or a fictitious “North American Union.” But I am worried about the fact that more and more people want the UN to function as a world government. A UN agency has recently proposed that it take over the management of the Internet, and the agency chief admitted that part of the purpose is to make sure that small countries’ telecom monopolies are able to make money — by preventing other ways of getting data in and out of the country. Doesn’t that sound like a great excuse for repressive governments?

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