Good goddamn afternoon, dear reader.  If I was a mere mortal left to my own devices, I would likely spend today bitching about how exhausting it is to constantly be fighting various forces of shittiness every day, whether it’s the government, the matrix, friends and family, the woke, the System, the general public.  And it is exhausting.  But I figured out a while ago, life is fighting every day.  You’re fighting a war every single day, and it never ends.  And the enemy won’t let up if you’re sick, or are in the middle of a nervous breakdown or whatever, no…they will only take advantage of your weakened condition.  So bitch today I shan’t.  I’ll just keep up The Fight, and keeping an eye out for new places to stack bodies.

So instead, today I want to blow the whistle on the most elaborate con game this side of a Vegas poker tournament – and trust me, I’ve been both the mark and the dealer in this particular house of marked cards.

Picture this if you can: a 17-year-old version of yrs. truly, wide-eyed and bushy-tailed, stumbling through the hallowed halls of community college like some kind of educational pilgrim seeking enlightenment, only to discover that the promised land was actually a strip-mall diploma mill staffed by adjunct professors living in their cars and full-time faculty who’d rather be anywhere else doing literally anything else for twice the pay.

But did I learn?  Hell no.  I doubled down like degenerate pervert gambler chasing a royal flush with pocket twos.

Four years of undergraduate purgatory later – during which I accumulated exactly zero student loan debt (because I always had a job in college, and this was obviously not something worth going in debt for), but did acquire a working knowledge of precisely how many ways one can deconstruct the inherent patriarchal implications of grocery store checkout lanes – I found myself clutching a bachelor’s degree that qualified me for exactly one thing: more school.

So naturally, being the kind of masochist who enjoys having his intellectual teeth pulled without anesthesia, I enrolled in graduate school, where I spent another year (yeah, I did grad school in a year.  At that point I could have probably gone on to get a doctorate in about 3 months) learning to speak in the kind of serpentine academic prose that would make one of Hakeem Jeffries’ dumb-ass filibusters sound like a haiku.

The punchline?  The only job this entire academic odyssey qualified me for was teaching other people how to navigate the same labyrinthine bureaucracy of intellectual masturbation that had just spent five years systematically destroying my will to live.

Here’s where it gets really beautiful in that special way that watching a plane crash in slow motion can be beautiful: when I actually tried to teach students how to think – not what to think, but the radical concept of independent critical analysis – I was about as welcome as a functioning fire alarm in a crack house.

See, the dirty not-so-little secret that most people are terrified to acknowledge is that higher education has become less about education and more about indoctrination, less about developing minds capable of independent thought and more about mass-producing ideologically compliant foot soldiers who can organize the shit out of protest march but couldn’t balance a checkbook or run a for-profit business if their lives depended on it.

The numbers don’t lie, even when the institutions do: college graduation rates hover around 60% for four-year institutions and an absolutely dismal 29% for community colleges.  Let that sink in for a sec – these places are failing to graduate even half their students, yet we continue to funnel young people into this academic meat grinder like some kind of educational Soylent Green factory.

But here’s the really insidious part: the students who do manage to survive this intellectual hazing ritual emerge not as critical thinkers or problem solvers, but a zealous activists armed with undergraduate degrees in Gender Studies and enough righteous indignation to power a small city, yet somehow lacking the basic skills necessary to function in any capacity that doesn’t involve organizing boycotts or composing strongly-worded tweets about microaggressions.

Meanwhile, the STEM fields – you know, the disciplines that actually require students to engage with objective reality rather than constructing elaborate theoretical frameworks to explain why mathematics is racist – continue to produce graduates who can build bridges that don’t collapse, develop medicines that actually work, and create technologies that improve human lives rather than simply providing new platforms for performative outrage.

The rest of higher education has become nothing more than a grotesquely overpriced finishing school for professional complainers, a four-to-six-year program in how to transform every conceivable human interaction into an opportunity for moral preening and victim status acquisition.

And the cost?  Oh sweet merciful Christ, the cost.  Students are graduating with debt loads that would have bought them comfortable middle-class lifestyles just a generation ago, all for the privilege of being certified unemployable in any field that requires actual productivity rather than simply the ability to identify and catalog various forms of systemic oppression.

The faculty – and I say this as someone who’s been on both sides of this particular con game – are either true believers in the cause, drunk on their own ideological Kool-Aid and genuinely convinced they’re saving the world one consciousness-raising session at a time, or cynical opportunists who’ve figured out the academia is the last refuge for people who want to get paid for having opinions while never having to actually test those opinions against the harsh realities of the marketplace.

The administration, meanwhile, consists entirely of bureaucrats whose primary qualification is their ability to speak fluent horseshit while extracting maximum tuition revenue from students who are too young and naïve to understand they’re being sold a bill of goods that makes shooting dice on the street look like a noble profession.

So here’s my advice to any young person currently contemplating higher education: if you want to be a doctor, and engineer, a scientific researcher, or anything else that requires actual technical knowledge and skills, by all means, go to college.  Learn calculus, organic chemistry, or hot to design a bridge that won’t fall down when someone sneezes on it.

But if you’re thinking about majoring in anything that ends with “Studies” or requires you to write papers about your feelings regarding the intersection of race, class, and gender in 19th-century flower arrangement, save yourself the time and money.  You’ll learn more about the world by working a series of minimum-wage jobs than you will by spending four years in an academic echo chamber being taught to see oppression in everything from breakfast cereal to traffic lights.

The great irony is that higher education – the institution supposedly dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge and the development of critical thinking skills – has become the very antithesis of both, a place where curiosity goes to die and independent thought is systematically beaten out of students like some kind of intellectual conversion therapy.

And the most delicious part of this whole sick joke?  The people running this scam have convinced society that questioning their methods makes you anti-intellectual, when in fact, the most intellectually honest thing anyone can do at this point is to call bullshit on the entire enterprise and start over from scratch.

Because that’s what this is, dear reader: a massive, institutionalized fraud that makes Bernie Madoff look like a small-time grifter, and it’s time someone had the balls to say it out loud.

The emperor isn’t just naked – he’s charging admission for people to come look at his invisible clothes.

Class dismissed.

N.P.: “Never Right” – SIERRA VEINS