Fox & Friends used its Monday morning program to condemn America's secondary education system for "indoctrinating" students into support of socialism -- a trend one retired professor says is leading to Soviet-style genocide.
Retired NYU Liberal Arts studies educator and self-proclaimed "Professor Deplorable," Michael Rectenwald, tossed out a wide variety of statistics and anti-socialist fears that today's youth are graduating from colleges as indoctrinated socialists. Rectenwald has branded himself as an "anti-pc" former NYU professor on social media and authored the book Springtime for Snowflakes, which chronicles his time as a seemingly repressed capitalist-conservative among an overwhelmingly liberal field of professors.
The Monday Fox & Friends segment on "Why Today's College Kids Prefer Socialism" responded to Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus' comments to Fox News host Neil Cavuto Friday in which he warned viewers and parents that "almost 50 percent of students coming out of university today believe socialism is the answer." A 2018 Gallup poll found young people are increasingly rejecting capitalism as a viable economic system, with 51 percent of millennials having a "positive view" of implementing more socialist systems in America.
Host Steve Doocy led Rectenwald on a discussion of how the teaching of socialism somehow crept into the American collegiate system. The two traced their claims back to the 1920s, which is when the retired NYU professor said college educators tried bringing Soviet Union academic tactics back to the U.S. system.
"You had professors going over to the Soviet Union, you know, from America, going over to the Soviet Union, learning about the Soviet system of education and being convinced that they should bring it to the U.S. and re-engineer the entire education system after it," Rectenwald said.
Doocy mimicked the voice of a college student today, asking, "'Hey, why not? I'm an idealistic kid, I want everybody to get everything,' said Doocy, putting on his most condescending tone. "But that's socialism."
At no point in the fear-mongering discussion of students embracing socialism did Rectenwald mention any "socialist" programs the U.S. currently utilizes such as Social Security, Medicaid, public schools and public transportation systems. Rectenwald said the term "socialism" is now interchangeably used with the phrase "social justice" by young people today. He warned Fox viewers there is a "huge indoctrination process" taking place in colleges where he claimed "90 percent" of all professors are left-wing.
In 2018, Rectenwald filed a defamation lawsuit against New York University for making "malicious" statements against him for being conservative. He said in the world of academia, being called a "sexist" or a "racist" is the "kiss of death" to one's career.
"Forty percent of professors in the U.S. are socialist, 90 percent are leftists," Rectenwald claimed. When asked to clarify, Rectenwald said that statistic applied to professors in the humanities and social sciences field of academic study. He blamed the high number of alleged leftists on an academic bubble, saying he's seen aspiring PhD academics "thrown out" of programs simply for expressing conservative values.
Rectenwald then dramatically amped up his attack on socialist campus environments, saying young people's pursuit of equality may lead to mass genocide similar to that of the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin.
"It leads to the kind of forced egalitarianism that you saw in the Soviet Union, where you have to squash people down, so that everyone's quote-unquote equal. And it led to 94 million people being murdered combined in all the Communist regimes in the 20th century."
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Benjamin Fearnow is a reporter based out of Newsweek's New York City offices. He was previously at CBS and Mediaite ... Read more
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