This is real. This is the real mad man theory. We have to be irrational and vindictive, so people don't know what we're up to. This is not [Donald] Trump and [Steve] Bannon, it's from the [Bill] Clinton era.

It's a lesser-known story, but the Japanese government (after the Russian-Nazi pact, which split Poland) did allow Polish Jews to come to Japan, with the expectation that they would then be sent to the United States. But they weren't accepted, so they stayed in Japan.

In Mexico, a poor country, higher education is of quite good quality -- and is free. Ten years ago the government tried to impose small fees. There was a national student strike and the government backed down. High tuition is not an economic necessity, as is easy to show, but a debt trap is a good technique of indoctrination and control. And resisting this makes good sense.

If you're teaching today what you were teaching five years ago, either the field is dead or you are.

Far from creating independent thinkers, schools have always, throughout history, played an institutional role in a system of control and coercion. And once you are well educated you have already been socialized in ways that support the power structure, which, in turn, rewards you immensely.

The media want to maintain their intimate relation to state power. They want to get leaks, they want to get invited to the press conferences. They want to rub shoulders with the Secretary of State, all that kind of business. To do that, you've got to play the game, and playing the game means telling their lies, serving as their disinformation apparatus.

If something comes along that you don't like, there are a few sort of four-letter words that you can use to push it out of the sphere of discussion. If you were in a bar downtown, they might have different words, but if you're an educated person what you use are complicated words like "conspiracy theory" or "Marxist." It's a way of pushing unpleasant questions off the agenda so that we can continue in our own happy ideology.