such a “storm of outraged ego” is an increasingly common phenomenon among students who, having been taught to regard themselves as peers of their teachers, “take correction as an insult.” Nichols relates this to myriad intellectual viruses thriving in academia. Carried by undereducated graduates, these viruses infect the nation’s civic culture.
.. “College, in an earlier time,” Nichols writes, “was supposed to be an uncomfortable experience because growth is always a challenge,” replacing youthful simplicities with adult complexities. Today, college involves the “pampering of students as customers,”
.. “Rather than disabuse students of their intellectual solipsism,” Nichols writes, “the modern university reinforces it,” producing students given to “taking offense at everything while believing anything.”
.. Much attention has been given to the non-college-educated voters who rallied to President Trump. Insufficient attention is given to the role of the college miseducated. They, too, are complicit in our current condition because they emerged from their expensive “college experiences” neither disposed nor able to conduct civil, informed arguments.
.. Soon, presidential enablers, when challenged about their employer’s promiscuous use of “alternative facts,” will routinely use last week’s “justification” of the illegal voting factoid: It is the president’s “long-standing belief,” so there.
In his intellectual solipsism, he, too, takes correction as an insult. He resembles many of his cultured despisers in the academy more than he or they realize.
Rush Limbaugh: ‘We Are on Offense With Donald Trump’
.. My advisers are telling me exactly that, Rush, they’re telling me to ignore it. But I can’t. I’m not gonna sit here and let my family be dishonored. I’m not gonna let myself, my family be lied about and I’m not gonna let those lies take root and become established as truth. I don’t care. I don’t care what they say is the right way to do this, I’m not gonna let it happen. When people lie about me, when people wound me, when people attack me, I’m gonna fire right back at ’em, I don’t care. And my advisers are trying to get me to stop, and I just can’t.”
That’s why he continues to tweet, and his tweets are effectively going around a dishonest media to inform and connect with everyday Americans. He’s also conducting negotiations with his tweets by informing people what he’s doing. And by doing this, by tweeting in this unpresidential way, not seen anything like this, it’s just not how it’s done, Trump is also capturing the whole idea of unpredictability, which makes Trump a never ending top-line news story and has his adversaries always on defense.
.. “our side,” I mean, conservatives, some Republicans — admit it, folks, we’ve grown tired and weary of being on defense all the time. We’re tired of getting up every morning and looking at either a person or an idea, something that we hold dear under assault, like marriage, or who can use whatever bathrooms, we’re tired of being on defense, we’re tired having to defend things that shouldn’t need to be defended because they’re under assault.
.. And that’s one of the big invisible unspoken reasons why he has such loyalty is because people who support him are just like a lot of you in this audience, fed up with being on defense and being on a team that never fought back, much less went on offense. But these tweets and this erratic or unpredictable behavior keeps Trump’s opponents on defense, and, believe me, it is a delight to see it.
.. Another thing that Trump is doing with these tweets, he’s leading. And because he’s leading, he’s holding everybody’s attention. What will Trump do next? What will Trump do next? Nobody’s asking, what’s Pelosi gonna do next, what’s Harry Reid? You know, we’re not steeling ourselves for what assault is coming at us next. We’re all looking on eagerly: What’s Trump gonna do next? How’s he gonna bamboozle ’em next? How’s Trump gonna end-run ’em next? That’s what’s everybody excited about here.