Leadership Quote by Jack Kingston

Kingston’s line is a neatly packaged grievance, built to travel. It opens with “Indeed,” a word that borrows the tone of settled fact without doing the work of proving it. From there, he stacks “prejudices” against “everyday middle-class values,” a phrase that sounds descriptive but functions as a moral ID badge: ordinary, decent, unfairly mocked. The move isn’t to define those values; it’s to make disagreement with his coalition feel like disdain for normal people.

Then comes the strategic pivot: “serving in the military and being pro-American just seems to be one of them.” “Seems” is doing a lot of legal and rhetorical lifting, allowing insinuation without evidence while still landing the punch. The pairing of military service with “pro-American” also tightens the circle of belonging. If campus culture is framed as hostile to the troops, it can be framed as hostile to the country itself. The target isn’t just “college campuses” as physical places but as a symbol of elite gatekeeping: credentialed, cosmopolitan, and (in conservative folklore) reflexively contemptuous.

Context matters: this is a post-60s, post-Iraq, culture-war script, where universities are cast as factories of liberal orthodoxy. Kingston isn’t mainly arguing about campus policy; he’s constructing a social hierarchy with his voters on the virtuous ground floor and academia in the penthouse, sneering down. The intent is coalition maintenance: convert complex debates about nationalism, war, and dissent into a simpler story about respect, loyalty, and who gets to define “America.”