Trigger Warning: Some readers of this essay may object to the use of the word “freak” in ways that raise questions about how we may best characterize many current political figures and actions. And if you’re not offended, I haven’t done my job. So, let’s get on with things, beginning with the observation that while many of us are seeking professional counseling to cope with His Royal Orangeness clinching the Republican nomination for President, other things of political importance have plagued network headlines. All of which will demonstrate that insanity may be contagious; you catch it from professors and government officials.

Let’s begin with professors, specifically, a clutch of nut-job dons (but I repeat myself) at George Mason University who complained about renaming their law school after recently deceased Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, in exchange for a cool $30 million donation. As Christian Adams reported in PJMedia, these self-important undergraduate ninnies were concerned about “groups that were slighted by Justice Scalia,” perhaps “offended” by decisions he made on important cases.

It gets worse: look at the credentials of a few prominent objectors. One of them was an advocate for “trans justice and prison abolition, and queer anarchist anti-war activism,” and referred to Scalia as racist and homophobic. Another who specializes in “whiteness … and queer and feminist theories” has previously inveighed against “white terror” and declared “Capitalism is not in crisis. Capitalism is the crisis.” Another opposes sex-offender registries; still another whose research “is grounded in intersectional theory, with an explicit focus on race, class, gender, and sexuality,” opined that the law school renaming proposal constituted a plot by “two White, heterosexual, upper-class men” on a power trip. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

On a different issue, last November Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal stated that a prominent Stanford Ph.D.’s “rhetorical goo” issued from “deep layers of mental flab,” which made her a “perfect representative of American academia. And American academia is, by and large, idiotic.” And a quick detour to the media world unearths a droll quip by Townhall’s Matt Vespa about a Fusion writer agonizing over her unborn son’s possible dalliance with “whiteness.” From NewsBusters, we hear her praying (praying!) “that his privilege, should he inherit it, will not divide us.” She goes on: “I fear that my son—insulated for nine-odd months in the warm shelter of my womb—will burst into the world and not recognize me. I fear that he will, in the midst of latching his tiny mouth around my nipple, see its darkness against his impossibly pale skin and see not his mother, but a stranger.” Nipples aside, a little old-fashioned assimilation here after Junior pops into the world would probably go a long way.

Then there’s government, pick your agency—let’s make it the Department of Justice, which is always good for a laugh or two. Actually, make that outrage, especially in a recent analysis of John Hinderaker, who reported in Powerline how “Under Eric Holder and now Loretta Lynch, DOJ has become a lunatic enforcer of far-left fantasies. The latest instance is DOJ’s letter to the Governor of North Carolina, claiming that North Carolina’s law requiring that bathrooms, locker rooms and so on be used by those of the proper sex–male or female, based on physical organs–violates the federal civil rights laws.” He carefully cites the laws in question to avoid any mistake in interpretation, and concludes his story, which bristles with wit and incredulity, by portraying the incident as “insane.” And of course he is right.

So here we have it—idiocy, lunacy, insanity, over and over again—what does all this mean? Simply this: much of American academia, which feeds media and government, is dominated by, for lack of better term, freaks. Which spawns an entirely new category of research that may be termed freakanalysis (Let’s refuse to call it Studies in Freakology, please). What exactly is a freak? Merriam-Webster’s definition actually isn’t very helpful, but its list of synonyms, antonyms, and related words is enlightening. Synonyms include abnormality, anomaly, monster, and monstrosity. Antonyms are average, norm, normal, par, and standard. Many of the “Related Words” will blow your socks off: abortion, malformation, miscreation, mutant, mutation; character, crackbrain, crackpot, crank, eccentric, kook, nut, oddball, screwball, weirdo; aberrant, deviant; individualist, maverick, nonconformist; curiosity, peculiarity, singularity; aberration, exception, irregularity, oddity, and rarity. Probably a few others come to mind, but this isn’t a bad list.

Nor is it entirely derogatory, in that some of the “related terms” could actually be used in a complimentary way. Unfortunately, this is hardly the case in trying to explain American politics over the last two generations, especially since Allan Bloom blew the lid off the whole scam in higher education with The Closing of the American Mind a quarter century ago. In fact, if there were a political version of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, it undoubtedly would include most of the terms that find comfortable usage in educational, media, and governmental circles today, all created, with no sense whatsoever of their utter absurdity, by freaks.

Of course, not all freaks are alike but most share an outstanding characteristic, which is this: until recently, very few could survive outside a protected institutional environment. Thus, criminal freaks are incarcerated, and more recently, young felons are labeled “justice involved youth,” which is another example of how far freakish terminology has invaded government agencies. Speaking of academia, probably no other domain in America is more dominated by freaks than the country’s colleges and universities. The fact is that America’s professors may spout the most outrageous ideas, indoctrinate students with the most pernicious ideological cliches, and promote the most hateful propaganda about their country with nary a thought about facing any consequences, because the chances of being dismissed are practically nil. Academic freaks, unlike their counterparts in prison, rarely have to cope with the bracing effects of personal responsibility for what they say and do.

Unfortunately, absent some inconceivable upheaval, America’s production lines of freaks will continue indefinitely, generating results that will continue to transform the country in grotesque ways, thought unimaginable, say, a half century ago. Perhaps the wisest observer of this type of phenomenon was Irving Kristol, who, in an essay written thirty-five years ago, recounted a conversation he had with J. L. Talmon about Talmon’s recent book, Political Messianism. Kristol asked if Talmon had overstated his case about the gnostic emphasis in political thought during the first half of the 19th century. Talmon said no, and Kristol concluded he had to agree.

Then Kristol went on to make the following observation about Talmon’s research: “Political thought in the first half of the nineteenth century was gnostic to the point of insanity. Saint-Simon was insane. Comte was insane. Fourier was insane. Marx was insane. Prior to the eighteenth century, anyone enunciating the notion that politics is concerned with the expectation of a universal regeneration of humanity … would have qualified for the loony bin.” Kristol also concluded that it was ludicrous to take these people seriously because in fact they were “religious fanatics of a peculiarly modern kind.”

And so it is with so many professors and politicians today, many of whom in fact are “fanatics [sometimes religious] of a peculiarly modern kind.” Indeed, prior to the 1960s or thereabouts, anyone who expounded gibberish about such things as whiteness, queerness, trans-something-or-other, micro-aggressions, trigger warnings, and safe spaces, along with a host of fabricated phobias and isms that have seeped into political and social discourse, would have qualified for the loony bin. They are, in fact, freaks, who are trying to remake the world in their own freakish image, like Comte, Saint-Simon, and Marx along with a bevy of other radicals before them.

And if history is any guide, a world based on the macabre designs of fanatics and freaks will result in a hellish life for the rest of us.