Response to a recent Chartock column

In a recent column, Alan Chartock claimed that “This election was all about Trump and his dangerous foolery.” The only “dangerous foolery” that I can see here is being committed by Chartock himself.

Chartock claims that Trump “continued the thread that came out of the American Civil War. Slavery may have been abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment, but all those who study the American sociology know that slavery was followed by Jim Crow and all those tricks that kept people of color in their places.” Chartock apparently either doesn’t study “American sociology,” doesn’t understand it, or is simply trying to hide the fact that all those Jimcrow laws and tricks to keep people of color in their places were enacted by white Southern Democrat controlled state legislatures.

Moving from unmistakable ignorance to laughable ignorance, Chartock blames Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump on help from the “devil’s deal” known as the Electoral College.

Chartock amazingly doesn’t seem to understand the fact that our country is a constitutional republic and that sovereign states are not merely political subdivisions of the federal government. I can fully appreciate why our founding fathers didn’t want a handful of incompetently governed states to dictate to the other 45 or so sovereign states that actually know what they are doing.

Every Sunday, no matter what the topic of his column, Chartock calls Trump various juvenile names without any factual basis. What more should we expect from a man whose hero is arguably the worst governor this state has ever had, Andrew Cuomo? To what depths has our State Universities fallen?

In his book titled “The Breakdown of Higher Education,” John M. Ellis describes an article written in 2017 by professor Bruce Gilley titled “The Case for Colonialism” and writes “Gilley argued that whatever the motives of the colonialists, they had improved many lives, while the regimes that took their place have done a great deal of damage.”

Gilley’s essay caused an enormous uproar. A faculty petition calling for the withdrawal of the essay gained more than 10,000 signatures. Fifteen members of the editorial board of the journal in which the article appeared resigned.

Ellis writes “What was truly astonishing about this episode was that here were literally thousands of people with professorial appointments who completely rejected the very idea of academic thought and analysis. They were so fully in the grip of a political animus that they would not allow anyone who didn’t share their political viewpoint to be heard,” and continued, “For them, historical fact can never be allowed to complicate or interfere with that fiercely held political opinion.”

What is very disturbing about the signatories of that petition and Alan Chartock is what they are telling our children. Colleges are no longer centers of free thought, learning, and debate, they are centers for the dissemination of propaganda.