George Ciccariello-Maher, the nation’s most beloved communist professor who has made such erudite statements as “all I want for Christmas is white genocide” and the Las Vegas massacre “is what happens when [white people] don’t get what they want,” is no longer teaching at Drexel University.

The school placed the tenured politics professor on leave in October after he blamed the Las Vegas massacre on “white supremacist patriarchy,” citing safety concerns and threats the professor had received. Drexel let him continue teaching a couple weeks later, but only remotely.

Just days before the new year, Ciccariello-Maher announced he won’t work at Drexel in 2018. The former professor said “after nearly a year of harassment by right-wing, white supremacist media outlets and internet mobs, after death threats and threats of violence directed against me and my family, my situation has become unsustainable.”

Wow, this guy’s a spin master. No one condones threats, of course, but right-wing, white supremacist media outlets? What’s funny about Ciccariello’s coverage is that a lot of it was just “professor said X.” There’s no commentary needed for people to see how crazy it is for the former professor to blame mass murder on whiteness.

Anyways, at the end of the day, the former professor is a hypocrite. After Drexel kicked him off campus, he positioned himself as a champion for academic freedom. But when speaking with Tucker Carlson, he suggested that opinions needed the blessing of academic peer review to receive the protections of academic freedom.

While he’s no longer a professor, George kicked off the New Year by announcing that he’d be joining the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at New York University as a visiting scholar. The institute apparently meshes scholarship, politics, and artistic expression together to investigate “embodied practice—performance—as a vehicle for the creation of new meaning and the transmission of cultural values, memory, and identity.” Drexel, meanwhile, praised George for being an “outstanding classroom teacher.”

Otherwise healthy Democrats have gotten ever more hysterical when it comes to matters of culture, economy, and governance. Is doltishness a side effect of a vegan diet? Could all of that Californian fog be getting to their heads? Or is the left simply a product of an education which encourages facile empathizing over shrewd analysis?

It just so happens to be the case that one of the cultural industries colonized by the left – Hollywood – is packed with graduates of a department whose “curriculum” consists of the same tricks and theatrics progressives use to push their grievance-centric, feelings-over-facts agenda.

These same theater grads now have platforms that grant them incredible pull on American voters.

Basic drama curriculum often resembles tactics employed by social justice activists:

Rehearsal – imperative for memorizing “to be or not to be” and “no Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA” alike. Party lines are easier to recite if they have been memorized and practiced.

Improvisation – cute when contained to the stage, insufferable when it translates to duplicitous filibustering or impromptu protests

Projection – here referring to both the presumptuous bloviation and the banshee-like shrieking to which progressives are inclined, both on and off-stage

Insincerity – whether you’re trying to get audience engagement or the mean conservative banned from campus, crocodile tears work wonders

When they’re not learning their sentiments, aspiring actors often acquire practical skills like lighting, sound design, and playwriting. Good for them! But conceptual coursework ensures that malleable minds don’t wander too far from the progressive echo chamber and its cancerous identity politics.

To indoctrinate or not to indoctrinate…that seems to be the question within many a university drama department.

Take my alma mater, the University of Virginia’s drama department, which offers a course called “Performing Race & Citizenship.” Professor Katelyn Wood deserves a pat on the back for constructing this double entendre. Skin color and citizen status are, indeed, capricious items that aren’t at all genetic or something you obtain once, but are, like seemingly everything else these days, social constructs that change with the season or when professionally expedient (hi, Rachel Dolezal and Elizabeth Warren!). While performing citizenship may involve UVA allowing illegal alien students to masquerade as Americans while guzzling up tax dollars, something tells me performing race will not involve blackface.

I’d be remiss not to address the UC Berkeley theater department catalog, hyperlinked here for your comedic pleasure. If the Romans desired to build an ideological Trojan horse instead of a physical one, they sure could take lessons from Berkeley Drama’s inconspicuous courses such as Undocumented Subjects: Performance and Immigration in/outside of the US and a course asking “who are we socially when our bodies need to go [to the bathroom]?” Needless to say, the only practical course comes in the form of How to Be Alone, something crucial for every loveless SJW to learn.

Javier Munoz, who plays Alexander Hamilton in Hamilton, graduated from New York University. NYU’s drama honors program has “4-credit courses on a variety of subjects in theatre and performance studies.” Gender, Performance, and the Third Wave and Feminism, Gender and Sexuality in Performance made up the diverse offerings of the program’s Spring 2017 iteration.

The former class promises to glean insight from feminist plays alongside Jezebel, Tumblr, Feminist Frequency, and a socialist who refuses to spell her name with capital letters. Meanwhile, the second class focuses on privilege and the glass ceiling. Unlike the topics, the assignments presumably exist.

It sure seems like all the world’s a stage, but only the study of certain segments grounded in emotion are useful in advancing the left-wing agenda. Considering the veritable mix of feigning devices and progressive propaganda lapped up during their education, is it any wonder that Hollywood stars are the crusaders in the left’s world of pretend?