California’s Stanford University has been on the cutting edge of the Marxist indoctrination of America since the 1960s. The first “sit-ins” to oppose the war in Vietnam and doing your duty, I’m sorry, I mean opposing draft registration, were held at Stanford. For fifty years, this elite university has churned out graduates who, if they follow what they are taught at Stanford, are hostile to the US Constitution and the idea of anything resembling a free market.
Needless to say, the Stanford College Republicans face hostility from the university administration day-in and day-out. This year they had to fight to get speakers on campus and contend with protests of those speakers. The high point came when the university disapproved of the logo for the group because it contained an American flag motif. That just about tells you all you need to know.
If you are a member of Stanford College Republicans, you are serving a combat tour. If you are an officer in the organization, you are a marked man.
John David Rice-Cameron can trace his conservative roots to his middle school years. Back then, his father would often have talk radio on during rides home from school or tennis practice.
“Sometimes my dad would listen to Rush Limbaugh and he would kind of argue with him,” recalls Rice-Cameron, 20, a sophomore at Stanford University. “I just found myself agreeing with basically everything Rush Limbaugh was saying.”
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Rice-Cameron started listening to talk radio on his own. That’s when he discovered Mark Levin, saying the firebrand pundit became his “ultimate political hero.”“He’d talk about John Locke, and so I’d go and read some John Locke. He’d talk about John Smith, so I’d go and read John Smith. He’d talk about the Federalist Papers, and so I read those,” Rice-Cameron said. “I discovered the intellectual roots of liberty.”
Fast-forward to today, Rice-Cameron — recently described by one campus publication as “Stanford’s most outspoken political provocateur” — is taking his passion for liberty and advancing it at Stanford University, his mother’s alma mater, as president of the College Republicans.
“If we are going to promote the liberty movement, if the liberty movement is going to succeed, we need to do something about these college campuses,” he told The College Fix in a telephone interview. “We need to ensure the liberty movement is heard.”
What makes John Rice-Cameron so significant is that his parents are ABC News producer Ian Cameron and former Obama national security adviser Susan Rice. Here is a guy whose future was made for him by just showing up if he’d embraced progressive politics but instead of merely rejecting them, he’s rejected them in a very loud and public manner.
History and culture are not straight line trajectories or “evolutionary” as Fukuy. Back in 1992, Francis Fukuyama published a book called The End of History and the Last Man in which he postulated that liberal democracy and globalization had won and all that was left was a bit of untidiness about the edges.
What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.
Very few people would hold that view today. Culturally, it is easy to see how the licentiousness of Georgian Britain whipsawed to the more straitlaced Victorian era. Similarly, the wide open era post World-War I/Depression/Prohibition America yielded the fairly conservative so-called “Silent Generation” and from that the Baby Boomers and all the social pathologies they endorsed. While Mr. Rice-Cameron has a high profile, I can’t imagine that he’s the only scion of a prominent Democrat who has change sides, so to speak. In fact, knowing what we know about how parental political preferences usually fail to be transferred to children (and there is a very simple reason why that I won’t get into here) it is hard to believe that there isn’t a substantial number of superficially liberal Democrats on campus who will abandon that philosophy once they enter the workplace.
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