Conservatives Should Be More Brave, Proactive, and Leverage Weaknesses of the Left: Professor

In the face of extreme policies peddled by the radical left, conservatives need to respond more boldly by using the power of institutions and leverage the weaknesses shown by the left to stop its destructive policies, according to a professor and researcher at a school of government.

Extreme politics that brought about pushing transgender ideology on children, the southern border crisis, and crime surges in big cities requires “strong, real, self-confident men and women to say ’absolutely no’ to this,” said David Azerrad, an assistant professor and research fellow at Hillsdale College’s Van Andel Graduate School of Government.

Many young people at colleges and universities who advocate for woke principles do not truly believe in them, Azerrad told EpochTV’s “Crossroads” program in an interview on Sept. 12.

“The kids who are at these elite universities are careerists. They’re ambitious … So they do the woke posturing because they feel pressure to their left,” Azerrad said, “but they never pay a price.”

“If you started putting pressure [on them], a lot of them would fold in line and collapse like a deck of cards,” the professor said.

For example, if a prestigious university institutes a policy that any student who disrupts a speaker is immediately expelled from the university with no diploma, the students’ behavior would change as they will not be willing to sacrifice a diploma for their woke principles, Azerrad explained.

Not True Believers Students walk through Sproul Plaza on the University of California–Berkeley campus in Berkeley, Calif., on April 23, 2012. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Some say that wokeness is a religion, Azerrad continued, but religions “produce people who sacrifice their lives for the cause.”

“I don’t see a lot of that with our wokeness. I see a lot of signaling. I see a lot of performative wokeness,” Azerrad