You can feed us bullshit, but that doesn't mean we're going to swallow it

Students at New College's graduation tell their graduation speaker to take his speech and shove it...and it was a beautiful thing

They don’t care. I hate it, but they really don’t care what I have to say.

- Joe Ricketts

Imagine it’s the day you’ve long waited for—your college graduation, the culmination of a dream long held. After years of schooling, you’ve finally achieved the degree that will allow you to go out into the world and begin carving out your place in it.

Except that you’re graduating from New College in Sarasota, Floriduh, which Gov. Ron DeSatan has spent the past two years dismantling. Once a place with a reputation for being unique and vibrant and offering tremendous academic flexibility, Gov. DeSatan has worked to turn it into a dull, grey, and exceedingly bland institution of Conservative indoctrination.

Thankfully, you’re getting out just in time. Still, you have friends in classes behind you who will have to decide whether to stay and face increasing Conservative vanilla blandness in the curriculum or jump ship and go elsewhere. Many have already done so as they’ve seen the writing on the wall—New College no longer values the things they matriculated there for—academic freedom, the ability to pursue the unusual, and the chance to think outside the box.

It seems like it’s all about conformity, groupthink, and obedience. Following the party line and parroting the dominant narrative is the Prime Directive, and the highest and best values revolve around the whims of a bloated, ambulatory meat sack with a significant flatulence problem.

As the final insult, the last nail in the coffin, the school’s new über-Conservative administration imposed a ridiculously Conservative speaker upon the graduates, who, none too happy about it, decided to express their displeasure.

Loudly.

Joe Ricketts is one of those billionaire shit-gibbons who got spectacularly lucky with one business venture (founding TD Ameritrade) and thinks that makes him some sort of super-genius in other areas (owning the Chicago Cubs, government, knowing whether Barack Obama was a secret Muslim and thus an enemy of America). You know, insulated grotesquely-wealth-guy stuff.

So it must have been an absolute shock to his wizened heart when he stood up to give the commencement address at New College of Florida last Friday and learned pretty decisively that the youngs are not impressed.

And why should they have been predisposed to listen to Ricketts?? What lessons did he have to impart to them? Get lucky, and maybe you’ll get rich? Capitalism good, socialism bad??

From The Sarasota Herald-Tribune:

As the billionaire founder of TD Ameritrade spoke, the student section would erupt in boos, chant “free Palestine” and expletives. Students also wore stoles bearing the flag of Palestine, following a national trend of higher education protests against the war in Gaza.

“They don’t care,” Ricketts said to [New College President Richard] Corcoran on stage after stopping his speech. “I hate it, but they really don’t care what I have to say.”

Ha ha, he didn’t get to finish his speech and then whined about it within range of the microphone. He probably hasn’t heard boos like that since he traded Kris Bryant to the Giants.

Of course, they don’t care. They’re graduating from college; they’re smart enough to know when someone is feeding them pure, unadulterated bullshit. They didn’t spend four years of their lives and go thousands of dollars into debt to be fed lines of crap at graduation.

The students, who’ve been present at the crime scene for the past two years, are well aware of Ricketts’ role in the travesty perpetrated upon their alma mater.

It was an easy bet that New College students would not want to listen to a multi-billionaire they associate with the reactionary right-wing takeover of their school read the menu of available toppings in a frozen yogurt shop, much less the usual platitude-laden commencement speech. Considering what these kids have watched the adults do to New College the last couple of years under the leadership of Ron DeSantis and Chris “Fascist Howdy Doody” Rufo, having to listen to Ricketts probably felt like one final insult on the way out the door.

Of course, the proto-fascists who’ve taken over New College and transformed it from a place of life and color into a grey, lifeless institution seem not to understand why students aren’t doing cartwheels over the changes. After all, they’re thinking, we’ve made it better, more uniform, and more ideologically sound!

Meanwhile, the students, who remember what New College once was, understand what a tedious and vanilla place it’s become.

Ricketts, it turns out, is one of those old conservatives who thinks today’s college students are getting too much liberal instruction in their colleges, most likely from Communist hippie professors who no longer teach them about the great literature and thinkers of Western civilization. Rather, the hippies are obsessed with that dread word “diversity,” so now universities are churning out graduates who the Joe Rickettses of the world complain have been indoctrinated. And by indoctrinated, they mean “hates Aristotle and architecture involving Doric columns.”

So a few months ago, New College announced it was launching a virtual liberal arts degree program, with scholarship funding from Ricketts. The degree will be classics-centered, by which we mean it will be geared towards reassuring old white people who flip their shit at the thought that somewhere a 19-year-old is reading Toni Morrison instead of Plato that they are still the dominant culture.

The program incorporates material from the Ricketts Great Book Curriculum, which New College described as “empower[ing] students with a liberal arts education adapted for life in an ever-changing world by providing curriculum based on essential teachings from the greatest thinkers in history.” Students will “learn how to think – not just what to think,” according to the Curriculum’s website, which promises courses in ground-breaking areas like “Greek drama” and “medieval philosophy.”

Basically this is the same spirit animating Bari Weiss’s University of Austin grift, designed to give conservatives that frisson of excitement that they are reading secret texts that could get them thrown into prison, like Soviet dissidents passing around illegal copies of Boris Pasternak novels.

Bottom line, what this means is that Conservatives, who are all sorts of worried that Liberal colleges and universities are “indoctrinating” students into “subversive” thinking like Marxism-Leninism, Obama-ism, or some other “ism” they haven’t thought of but will soon, will be doing their own brand of indoctrination.

By turning New College into a Right-leaning institution of higher education, they can teach young Conservatives WHAT to think, which to Conservatives in power is far more important than teaching them HOW to think. When you break it down, obedience is far more critical to the Far-Right than thinking.

When people begin thinking for themselves, the problems start for Conservatives. When people OBEY and stay between the lines instead of thinking outside them, they’re easier to control. Situations and outcomes become easier to control. Authoritarian governments don’t want people who think outside boxes; they want people who follow orders and carry out instructions to completion.

In other words, shut up, obey orders, and stay in your lane. Follow orders, don’t ask questions, and you’ll go far in the New World Order ©.

“Liberal Arts” is a misnomer to Conservative thinking because the Liberal Arts are all about the life of the mind, and a lively mind not tuned without fail to the desires and imperatives of Lord Stumblefuck is a danger to an authoritarian regime.

Shockingly — or not, if you’re not the sort of moron who thinks Joe Ricketts is correct — faculty at New College are not thrilled about this venture. Some of them at a meeting a few months ago voted against the program 25-1:

According to some faculty members who spoke with 10 Tampa Bay, the online curriculum falls short for a variety of reasons including what they describe as a lack of transparency. […]

"We were not a part of the conversation of how to make it so that it's properly linked to the current program, and is a well-done and well-structured idea," she added.

It’s adorable that this New College faculty member thought for one second that the school’s new wingnut leadership gives a shit about whether a billionaire racist sugar daddy’s handpicked college curriculum meshes with current requirements.

This is the second year in a row that New College students have used commencement to make known their feelings about what DeSantis and company have done to their school. Maybe next year the school could invite someone who is not a skeevy MAGA wingnut to speak to the graduates.

Yeah, it is kind of adorable that the faculty member or anyone else would believe that anyone in Gov. DeSatan’s orbit would give a golden shit about any wooly-headed Librul’s concern about anything.

Conservatives are on top of the mountain in Floriduh, and because of that, they’re busily remaking the Sunshine State into a permanent Conservative Paradise ©. By the time Democrats finally come back into power, Floriduh will be so thoroughly fucked up that there will be no to fix things. They won’t even know where to begin.

New College is only one part of their plan, and one they seem pretty happy with, thank you very much. To them, the kids acting up during graduation are just a bunch of immature Liberals of no consequence who will soon be gone, to be replaced by the well-behaved children of Conservatives who will be open to learning the RIGHT things.

Somewhere warm and breezy, Josef Goebbels is smiling over an icy-cold Corona….

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