The Morning Rant: Minimalist Edition

One thing the Covid catastrophe helped to do is expose the insanity on our campuses. Far from the romantic and naive image of ivy-covered buildings inside of which our youth was educated by the best and brightest minds, we were shown the seedy, ignorant, jingoistic underbelly of academia: Pink-haired lunatics cheering for terrorists; life-long academics teaching straight-up socialism as dogma; the complete dismantling of objective educational standards, replaced with build-your-own majors that were obviously utter nonsense; savage hatred of America and its institutions; and worst of all, outrageous costs associated with utterly useless degrees!

And all the while they are being convinced that they are morally and intellectually superior to those grunting Yahoos who cook their meals and fix their cars and build their houses and pick up their garbage.

Johnny can't write; Johnny can't read; Johnny can't think! And Johnny certainly can't do anything other than make a pumpkin-spice Latte with soy milk.

But Johnny sure is entitled! And if he can't get a job in an NGO making six figures, he will agitate for Universal Basic Income, paid for by you!

Contrast that with the small number of bright high school students who decided that $100,000 for four or five wasted years leading to a useless degree might not be as good a plan as going to work for the local electrician, with the real opportunity to gain tremendous real-world skill, then move on to building a business! Besides, if that high schooler is a man, during those years in college he will be subjected to an endless litany of reasons why he is worthless and the source of most of the existential ills of Western culture.

Except there aren't enough of those folks.

Mike Rowe: “We’ve been telling kids for 15 years to learn to code.”

“Well, AI is coming for the coders.”

“It’s not coming for the welders, the plumbers, the steamfitters, the pipefitters, the HVAC, or the electricians.”

“In Aspen, I sat and listened to Larry Fink say we need… pic.twitter.com/7C3WpkKgMd

— JOSH DUNLAP (@JDunlap1974) July 17, 2025

And those are just the trades! How about bank tellers and supermarket stockers and go-fers at car repair joints? All of those can lead to careers that might not be hip and cool, but certainly pay the bills.

It is blindingly obvious that education in America is broken, but there are solid pathways around the dysfunction. But our culture has to return to valuing labor and actual skills, rather than placing on pedestals the sorts of pseudo-skills that indicate success in the never-never-land of academia. Those fake skills are also conspicuously light in real effort, which is a skill all its own! Coming to work ready to...WORK! is a skill that is simply not taught in our schools. It is taught by parents, and often the school of hard knocks.

J.J. Sefton and I chatted on the current CutJibNewsletter podcast about a young woman in South Carolina who decided that hard work was right up her alley. Her name is Nykia Hamilton, and she is a testament to the glories of American Exceptionalism. I hope she never goes to college. She is far too valuable to America!

[Crossposted at CutJibNewsletter and X/Twitter] And the Apple and Spotify feeds for CJN's podcast should be working!

posted by CBD at 11:00 AM

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