But what if Henry was in part right, and that what Britain needed was the abolition of the institutional hotbeds of sedition and moral inversion that he considered Catholic monasteries to be? England and the United Kingdom went on to have some of their best innings as a nation after his reign, a winning streak that started in earnest with Good Queen Bess ended in the disaster of World War I, when German princelings resident in London fought German princelings resident in Berlin, who were fighting German princelings resident in St. Petersburg, and everybody lost.

What if we follow his lead, then, and abolish not the monasteries — the current incarnation of the post-Vatican II Catholic Church is taking care of that all by itself — but the Ivy League and a few other “elite” universities, the nests of “progressive” saboteurs who have inflicted incalculable damage on the United States since the arrival of the Frankfurt School on these shores just before World War II. …

So revoke their charters and close them all down for a period of at least ten to twelves years — the Ivies plus Stanford, MIT, Johns Hopkins, Vanderbilt, Duke, and the University of California campuses at Berkeley, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, Davis, and Irvine. Fire everybody and start over again, eliminating useless majors, returning a core curriculum of Western civilizational values, reducing grade inflation, abolishing affirmative action and anything smacking of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. What we need is the educational equivalent of a denazification program similar to the one instituted in Germany after World War II, to yank it out the moral corruption, root and branch. Only when the purge is complete should we allow them to re-open under the original terms of their chartering and under careful adult supervision.

[As a Catholic, I’m no fan of Henry VIII, but there’s no doubt that his actions led to a rapid reform of the feudal structure of Olde England (or more precisely, Late-Middle England). It led to a rise in the middle class and the promotion of meritocracy, which ushered in the concepts of limited executive power and the primacy of Parliament, after a revolt or two. But that leads to the obvious problem with Michael’s proposal here, which is that no one has the power to forcibly disband the Poison Ivies et al. You’d need an absolute monarch to execute this plan. It’s still a fun idea, though. — Ed]