Saturday, March 10, 2018

The forgotten: Campus Nonsense

Campus Nonsense (styled: CampusNonsense on their site when it was fully running) has been ruins since 2003 or 2004 - it was an aggregator site for Bush II-supporting College Republicans. It got some notice in the National Review (where Stanley Kurtz brought it up while introducing NoIndoctrination.org, this anti-"leftist indoctrination" website founded by a La Mesa, Calf.-based mother of a UC San Diego student who had to learn about things Mommy wasn't happy about; it was a narking site where people complained about "leftist bias" in college classes. NoIndoctrination vanished right after Obama was elected.) However, to the wider world the life and death of Campus Nonsense was like the saga of Pets.com without the "saving grace" of the dog hand puppet who was that businesses' mascot.

Their list of links:

The War in Iraq: STUDENTS FOR WAR
Brandeis: United We Stand
Columbia: Students United for America
Harvard Law: Students Protecting America
Oxford: Oxford Democracy Forum
Princeton: Princeton Committee Against Terrorism
Yale: Yale College Students for Democracy


Campus Blogs:
Arizona State: Collegiate Conservative
Arizona State: The Conservative Underground
'Bama: The College Pundit
Berkeley: Angry Clam
Berkeley: CalStuff
Berkeley: Gene Expression
Bucknell: Insurgancy
Bucknell: Michael Boland
Bucknell: AK's Blog
Dartmouth: Dartlog.net
Dartmouth: Dartmouth Observer
Dartmouth: Free Dartmouth
Georgetown: In the Search for Intelligent Life
Harvard: Glenn Kinen
Indiana U: Hoosier Review
Michigan State: State News Blues
NYU: Armchair Activist
Ohio U: McNary Blog
Ole Miss: The Ole Miss Conservative
Rice: Courreges
SFSU: SFSU Conservative
Stanford: Bo Cowgill
Stanford: The Cardinal Collective
Texas Tech: seanmdavis.com
U of Alabama: Little Sanity
U of Denver: Matthew Edgar
U of Denver: Protein Wisdom
U of Illinois: Mirror in the Bathroom
U of Ill.-Springfield: UIS Blog
U of New Mexico: Combat
U of Pittsburgh: Weblog Free Pittsburgh
U of Texas: Strategeric Thought
U of Vermont: VT Reactionary
U of Vermont: Don't Mess With Vermont
U of Wisconsin: Descent into Madness
UC Irvine: IRlog
UNC-Chapel Hill: Kyle Still
Virginia Tech: Hokie Pundit
Yale: Yale Free Press Blog
Conservative Campus Papers:
American U: BenLadner.com
Bates College: John Galt Press
Berkeley: California Patriot
Boston College: Crossroads
Brandeis: Concord Bridge Magazine
Bucknell: The Counterweight
Claremont: Claremont Independent
Cornell: Cornell Review
Dartmouth: The Dartmouth Review
Duke: New Sense
Gettysburg: Gettysburg College
Kenyon College: Kenyon Observer
Michigan State: Common Sense
Northwestern: Northwestern Chronicle
Ohio State: The OSU Observer
Princeton: Princeton Tory
Stanford: The Stanford Review
SUNY Binghamton: Binghamton Review
Texas A&M: The Examiner
Tufts: The Primary Source
U of Chicago: The Criterion
U of Dallas: Justice
U of Florida: The Gator Standard
U of Illinois: The Orange and Blue Review
U of Michigan: Michigan Review
U of North Carolina: Carolina Review
U of No. Iowa: The College Redeemer
U of Oregon: Oregon Commentator
U of Texas: Austin Review
U of Texas: Contumacy
U of Washington: Right Turn
UC Irvine: Irvine Review
UC San Diego: California Review
UC Santa Cruz: Redwood Review
UCLA: The Criterion
UMass Amherst: The Minuteman
UNC Charlotte: Charlotte Patriot
Vanderbilt: The Vanderbilt Torch
Villanova: Villanova Times
Wabash College: Wabash Commentary
Washington U: Washington Witness
Yale: Yale Free Press

Most of those links are dead. One of the most annoying commenters on the site was Russel Henderson (class of 2002), who ran the dull blog The Vermont Reactionary and was involved in the University of Vermont's College Republican club. He is a lawyer and Army reservist today. That early-2000s version of the UVM GOP organization was forced to disband in 2007 after getting a loan to have Newt Gingrich appear on campus (i.e. paying for his speaking fees) and then never repaying the loan.

From what I've been able to figure out, all of this "conservablogging" came out of Morton C. Blackwell's Leadership Institute, a group concoted to win back college kids to GOPsterism in the aftermath of Watergate and the Pentagon Papers release. Right now they are working to spread anti-abortion thinking to Europe (especially to ex-Warsaw pact countries), but a decade ago they were pushing the Bush II line about fighting wars all over the Middle East. In fact, Blackwell's group is the first on the list of "student resources" on the blog:

Campus Leadership Program
Campus Conservatives
College Briefing
The Leadership Institute
American Collegians for Life
Young America's Foundation
Intercollegiate Studies Institute
Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE)
Students for Academic Freedom
No Indoctrination
Boundless
The Heritage Foundation
SCSU Scholars blog
Yorktown University
Student Discourse
Conservative Activism
Alabama Scholars Association
Accuracy in Academia

Did you notice "NoIndoctrination" as being part of the list?

It's my theory that Campus Nonsense was set up by "Josh" the alleged owner through the Leadership Institute or some other fake conservative think tank in order to promote the Bush II Administration's push for a second war on Iraq, mock the campus antiwar groups already existing thanks to Afghanistan, and then promote Bush II's re-election. After that point (re-election) the site could be abandoned. It didn't go as well as they hoped and the plug was pulled a year early, and all those early 2000s bloggers abandoned their sites after graduating.