Reaching this conclusion does not require reading any tea leaves or consulting any oracles; one need only listen to people like Vice President JD Vance, who in 2021 gave a speech called “The Universities are the Enemy” to signal that, like every authoritarian revolutionary, he intended to go after the educated.
“If any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country,” Vance said, “and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” Or, as conservative activist Christopher Rufo put it in a New York Times piece exploring the attack campaign, “We want to set them back a generation or two.”
