Lock her up.

               "Lock her up, lock her up"

A group of "conservative" high school students gathered at George Washington  University in Washington, D.C., for a leadership summit produced by Turning  Point USA, a group that indoctrinates with conservative memes on college campuses.  It is a group that contends that colleges and universities are dominated by liberal professors.  What it finds liberal are the processes and rules of honest, sound scholarship, which define how knowledge is generated, tested, and refined.  It is among those groups that want their political propaganda and indoctrination as a goal of higher education.

So, they brought Attorney General Jeff Sessions to rail at higher education.  He called out universities:

"Rather than molding a generation of mature and well-informed adults, some schools are doing everything they can to create a generation of sanctimonious, sensitive, supercilious snowflakes."

He said:

"Of all places, the college campus should be where debate and discussion should be appreciated and honored.  But nowhere has there been more arbitrary and capricious restrictions on free speech than in supposedly educational institutions."

He cited examples:

"After the 2016 election, for example, they held a “cry-in” at Cornell, they had therapy dogs on campus at the University of Kansas, and Play-dough and coloring books at the University of Michigan.  Students at Tufts were encouraged to “draw about their feelings.”"

 And then he said to his audience of high school conservatives:

“I can tell this group isn’t going to have to have Play-Doh when you get attacked in college.  When you get involved in a debate, you’re going to stand up and defend yourselves and the values that you believe in.”

 Members of the group started chanting "Lock her up. Lock her up.  Lock her up."  Sessions chuckled and said, "Lock her up. I heard that a long time over the last campaign.”

The significant point was that Sessions was railing about the emotional coddling universities when the students erupted with a chant referring to what Trump wants to do with Hillary Clinton.  The chant had no relevance whatever to what Sessions was contending in his speech.  It was the chant that Trump and his henchmen used during the election campaign to make the gullible and malevolent think Hillary Clinton had done something for which she should be incarcerated.

GOPers have tried to represent Hillary Clinton as personally responsible for the killing of an ambassador and embassy personnel at Benghazi.  A GOP-led Congressional investigation absolved her.  Then they tried and still are trying to make her use of a personal email server a capital crime,  glossing over the fact that numerous other cabinet officials, including another secretary of state, have done the same.  The GOP has resorted to a political tactic more typical of a banana republic-level nation where it is customary to falsely charge political opponents with crimes and jail them to eliminate the competition.  This tactic and outright murder are frequently employed in Russia, which was successfully diverted away from democracy after the fall of the Soviet Union.  Such tactics have been considered antithetical to the entire premise of American democracy until the advent of Donald Trump and the Americans who made him possible.  

Like well-conditioned Manchurian candidates, the high school students heard Sessions making accusations against higher education institutions and heard them as a trigger to unleash the hateful cant they have been programmed to emit.  Like Pavlov's dog, which salivated at the sound of a bell, the students responded with the only words they had been conditioned to utter when they heard an anti-liberal trigger.  Even though Hillary Clinton was not invoked by Sessions,  some of the student leaders decided it was time to respond with their entire repertoire of political argument:  "Lock her up. Lock her up." 


What should be obvious as a devastating irony is largely ignored by the accounts of the incident.  When Sessions berates college students for avoiding hateful and disrespectful and tells the high schools students that "When you get involved in a debate, you’re going to stand up and defend yourselves and the values that you believe in,"  their response is the mindlessly irrelevant chant of "Lock her up."

The irony is intensified by the fact that the incident took place on the campus of the old and highly reputable George Washington University which has a huge list of prominent alumni.

However, the incident is one of the many indicators of a nation that is sinking into the banana republic level and these are just the young people who will hasten that slide.  The people who call themselves conservatives have been busy undercutting education for decades.  Their claim, as in Turning Point USA's, is that education has been dominated by liberals, and what they define as liberal is a respect for fact and the teaching of critical thinking and the processes of making knowledge.  Their ideal is to create obedient students who will recite their dogmas on a command, even if the chants have no relevance to what is being discussed.

They represent the future.  If Trump and his disciples win, they guarantee a future of chanting "Lock her up" as their only response of which they are capable.