An excellent article in the Washington Post by a Portland, Oregon college professor disturbingly explains how critical thinking is often subverted today in American higher education. In the piece, Lucía Martínez Valdivia, an assistant professor of English and Humanities at Reed College, points out that hysterical, self-reinforcing thinking and physical intimidation tend to drown out reason in the process of squelching unpopular views.

U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has a very nice smile but “teeth of steel,” as Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko once characterized Mikhail Gorbachev. The steel derives from DeVos’ unbendably conservative Christian faith. She grew up in a devout family, was educated exclusively in Christian schools and is today an elder in an evangelical church. None of this is problematic, except ristian indoctrination of children.

The United States is starting to look more and more like uber-secular Western European cultures by the day, including those paragons of unreligious impiety France, New Zealand and the Netherlands. According to a recent National Geographic survey, the planet’s fastest growing religion is neither world-dominating Christianity nor Islam, it’s atheism—represented by a loose