OPINION:
Hundreds upon hundreds of America’s supposedly most sober, somber, serious and best-educated of the nation — historians, scholars, professors, attorneys and the like, have in recent times banded together, put pen to paper, and signed on to petitions and formal calls to impeach President Donald Trump.
But be not blinded by their dazzling degrees.
These people are bubble dwellers, living happily in their liberal enclaves.
The problem is when they emerge to try and speak with authority for all of America.
The problem is the whole system of higher learning in this country has been taken over by the left. In the end, it’s not just Trump who becomes the victim. It’s the emerging youth of America.
To an even larger degree, it’s truth.
The backstory is this: 750 or so of America’s esteemed historians and professors just affixed their names to a letter calling for Trump’s impeachment. That number, over the course of a few days, grew to 1,500 or so.
Before the “Impeach, Now!” clamoring of these historians, there were more than two dozen psychiatrists and psychologists who analyzed Trump’s behavior, long distance, and proclaimed him, in one book, a danger to society.
There was the separate “Trump on the Couch” book by psychoanalyst Justin Frank, who make the case on his Amazon page that Trump is “arguably the most psychologically damaged president we have yet had.”
And there were the Harvard types, the Duke professors, the Oklahoma State University political science experts, all of whom joined in the fray to offer up words of scholarly wisdom that went like this: Trump should go.
“14 University of Buffalo professors call for Trump’s impeachment,” Buffalo News reported.
“15 U.-affiliated historians sign letter supporting impeachment,” The Daily Princetonian, Princeton University’s publication, reported.
“More Than Five Hundred Law Professors Write A Letter Favoring Impeachment,” Forbes reported.
What a dizzying array of intellectualism. Right? It’s enough to make a blue-collar plumber or electrician go, “What do I know?”
But here’s the thing. This widespread distaste for Trump among the intellectual classes is not so much a sad and sorry commentary against Trump as it a sad and sorry indicator of America’s dying intellectual classes.
Absent challenge, the mind grows weak. Absent countering viewpoints, the craziest of ideologies can come.
Look at the collectivism of thought that permeates the leftists in the media, the ones who present, for example, third-trimester abortion as a sane and sensible women’s rights’ issue, or who insist, as another example, that boys can really become girls by donning skirts and heels. Look at the sheep bleating that taints the godless in the scientific community who say, for instance, climate change is settled science and that paving streets, painting walls and picking produce are all potentially disastrous human activities for the environment, needful of hefty government regulation.
It’s only through testing of ideas that growth and real truths can emerge.
Pitifully, the scholarly classes have exempted themselves from this sifting.
“The tribe in which they operate is leftist,” said Craig Shirley, one of America’s few, very few, scarce, very scarce, brass-ring-among-iron conservative historians, author of the new bestselling “Mary Bell Washington: The Untold Story of George Washington’s Mother,” on his fellow historians and their calls to impeach.
Indeed. So, too, all of America’s intellectual classes.
Just because hundreds or thousands of highly educated professionals get together to sign letters saying this president is unfit to serve — doesn’t mean he’s unfit to serve. It means these professionals were able to hit “send” in their email boxes and pass along the anti-Trump petition to all their other friends on their email list.
And for the thinkers of the world, it also means this: America’s intellectuals, adrift in a smoky la-la land of liberalism, need a speedy injection of reality and balance.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley.
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