Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty Images
In her most recent grievance filing for the Daily Mail, Meghan McCain directs her ire at America’s supposedly “woke” colleges and universities, labeling them “modern academic cesspools” that “no child of mine will ever attend.” Piling her rhetorical plate high with conservative red meat, McCain calls Stanford Law students and faculty who recently protested a conservative judge’s speech “snowflakes”; conflates a CUNY Law graduate’s criticism of the Israeli government with “antisemitism”; and cites a University of Connecticut course on anti-black racism among the “anti-American, anti-free speech, anti-capitalist garbage” plaguing higher education.
“When the time comes,” McCain claims, her kids “may be among those choosing a job over a major.” McCain cites declining college enrollment numbers as proof that millions who share her view aren’t “buying what they’re selling,” and warns that “American Universities better recognize that before they fail out”—an invocation of the right’s “go woke, go broke” threat—perhaps hoping that the next target of conservative boycotts will be the country’s colleges.
If the object of McCain’s diatribe is to affirm her position as a righteous freethinker opposed to institutions that “no longer strive to teach students how to think, but what to think,” an odd way to go about it is with a column essentially stating that no one is going to tell McCain’s daughters how to think—except for her.