“I think I have figured out the new virtue signal of the progressive left. A conversation in the early stages begins with, “in these dark times” or “because things are so bad right now.” What this really means is, “I hate Trump, and I am letting you know that without directly saying it.” It’s almost a test it seems. What are some graceful yet pointed responses to such behavior?”

—-Star Ethics Alarms commenter Mrs. Q, in last Friday’s Open Forum

Mrs. Q’s free-standing comment was prescient, because I had been preparing to post about New York Times’ periodic progressive opinion writer Frank Bruni’s obnoxious “What Do You Tell a College Student Graduating Into This America?” [Gift link!] in his subscriber-only newsletter. Bruni, who has carved out a niche for himself at the Times because he is fat and gay, has been flummoxed (he says) when seniors visit him in his faculty office at Duke (he teaches writing) and ask, as a recent Duke co-ed did, her eyes “red” and “watery,” “Where do you find hope?”

If he were not the most knee-jerk of knee-jerk progressives and crippled by Trump Derangement, he could have answered, “Oh, grow the hell up! You can find hope everywhere, and more here in the good ol’ U.S.A. than just about anywhere else.”

Not Bruni. The piece is a great example of how an essay that is mostly biased foolishness can be enlightening, indeed often more enlightening than opinion pieces that are spot on. For example, Bruni begins by writing, “[M]y students have the privilege of attending one of the country’s most selective and affluent universities and that simply getting a college degree, any college degree, gives them a big advantage.” Yes, it’s a big advantage that graduates from Duke and other leftist indoctrination factories do not deserve, as the weepy senior’s question demonstrates. Leaving the womb of academia for real life in a nation you have been taught has been unrelentingly racist, unjust and evil since 1690 is certain to feel hopeless.

More from Bruni…

[The student at my door and college students throughout the country made all sorts of decisions and nurtured all kinds of expectations based on one version of America only to encounter, less than three furious months into Trump’s second presidency, a much, much different one. It’s a situation suffused with bitter ironies: Those students have often been caricatured and vilified for not seeing enough good in America — for focusing on its betrayals rather than its ideals — and now they’re watching its leader betray those ideals daily, hourly, with a shrug or a smirk or, at least metaphorically, a cackle.

Black is white, up is down, War is Peace. There is no hope because the party that deliberately used an over-hyped health emergency to install a shell of a POTUS so it could manipulate the United States into socialism without the majority’s consent was rejected after screwing up virtually everything it touched. We are doomed because the effort to weaponize the legal system against a former President threatening to overthrow this cabal failed (amazingly). Life is miserable because illegal immigrants are finally being detained and sent home, and the “wink-wink” invitation to cross our borders at will has been cancelled. All is lost because the Left’s end-around Equal Protection is being exposed and undone.

It’s all Trump’s fault, Bruni says, describing ” “his cultural revolution” as “less research, more manufacturing. Fewer experts, more evangelists. Enough with roughage; bring on the beef. Let men be brutes and women be trad wives.” That seems like a fair summary, doesn’t it? Then comes the metaphorical cherry-picking and false characterizations, but surely all consistent with what he and his fellow faculty members have been teaching the sniffling student:

Does it do justice to what she’s witnessing — to the Trump administration’s abandonment of, and indifference to, a man consigned to a hellhole in El Salvador because of an administrative error? To Trump’s morally perverse rewrite of history, in which Ukraine is evil and Russia rightly aggrieved? To his pardoning of the savages who smashed their way into the Capitol and bloodied police officers on Jan. 6, 2021? To his veneration of autocrats and his administration’s fervent efforts to turn him into one? To its conception of power not as a blessing that compels you to be generous but as a bludgeon that allows you to be cruel?

This is not merely a change in the rules. It’s the collapse of decency and dignity.

“But what’s the fallback for a teetering democracy?” Bruni mewls. This is the fallback, you moron. Rejecting speech censorship and suppression. Reducing the ability of the government to waste money and explode the debt. Calling our education system what it is: an expensive failure, and addressing that failure. Rejecting the habit of exhausting American resources and taxpayer funds for foreign governments that are insufficiently grateful and trustworthy. Crippling the ability of embedded partisan saboteurs to foil the will of the people from inside the “Deep State.” Forcing the Axis media to either reform and do its job fairly and honestly, or to be eclipsed into irrelevance.

Etc.

And, poor weeping girl, if you don’t like the current President, you get a new one in four years. This is a dynamic and unpredictable nation, always evolving, always surprising. There is more hope here because not only is change possible, it’s perpetual.