By Joshua Tyler
| Updated 25 seconds ago

The end of World War I was a mess. Soldiers flooded home, without jobs, and with nothing to do. Veterans became angry and disillusioned; protests and social upheaval ensued.

With an even larger military force returning home after World War 2, the United States government sought to avoid repeating this mistake by finding ways to keep its returning soldiers busy. Their answer was the GI Bill, a massive funding system largely designed to keep veterans busy by funneling them into a gigantic college education system that hadn’t even really existed before the war and definitely wasn’t needed by the country as it was constructed back then. 

Before World War 2, fewer than 15% of men and 12% of women ever attended college. After World War 2, that number surged to 32% of men and 24% of women. It was the first time in human history that secondary education became a common fixture, and, out of nowhere, a booming post-High School education industry was willed into existence, born of a need to give traumatized soldiers a bunch of busywork.

As America spent the next few decades getting involved in further overseas wars, the endless funding of newly created college education for Veterans continued. Soon, it also became a way to get out of war, as men rushed to enroll in college to avoid a draft that would have sent them to die in Vietnam. By 1970, more than 50% of all high school graduates were attending college. 

In 1975, the Vietnam War ended, and the forced conscription of young men was over. At the same time, the United States government’s grant program began to drastically reduce spending, and free money for college began to vanish. 

Instead of free money in grants, the government and bankers began offering high-interest loans as a way to attend a University. And obviously, that’s not nearly as attractive. Now college wasn’t free, it wasn’t necessary, and men noticed. College enrollment for men began to dip.

So the powers that be decided to make college horny. This is the story of how Hollywood screenwashed men into living a life of debt slavery, just to get a shot at banging some girl from a sorority. 

It’s Not Just About Promising Hedonism

Right now, you’re probably thinking, ok, this one’s kind of obvious: Hollywood made a bunch of movies portraying college as a place of debauchery, so of course that got young men to go into debt thinking they’d get to party.

However, that’s only the surface level of what these movies are doing. The United States was still a majority Christian country until the late 1990s. Promising endless hedonism to Christian young men wouldn’t have been enough. Given the extreme level of debt slavery that colleges were asking men to sign up for, they needed something more than the possibility of drunken partying.

That something more is an Assimilation Rebellion. Once you see it, you’ll never be fooled by it again. You’ll also understand why, in recent years, young men have begun abandoning college as their way forward into life.

The College Comedy That Started It All

Since most college raunch comedies follow the same pattern, it makes sense to go to the source. The college raunch comedy was born on July 28, 1978, with the release of Animal House. It grew out of the anarchic comedy culture surrounding National Lampoon magazine in the 1970s. That magazine itself was spun off from the Harvard student publication Harvard Lampoon. 

All of this was deeply rooted in college culture, so when writers Harold Ramis, Douglas Kenney, and Chris Miller decided to write a movie script, they did so with a focus on wild fraternity stories Miller liked to tell about his time at Dartmouth. Instead of a polished college comedy, they made something crude, chaotic, and openly hostile to authority.

Everyone hated their Animal House script. No one in Hollywood wanted to make it. They rejected it as vulgar, gross, and ridiculous.

It only exists as a movie because of a man named Ned Tanen. He was the president of Universal Pictures, and he used his clout to push Animal House into production, even though no one else believed in it. 

Tanen made his career out of pushing counterculture propaganda pictures and films designed to change society’s views. Animal House was his biggest, and perhaps most important, persuasion victory.

Animal House’s Assimilation Rebellion

National Lampoon’s Animal House follows the disaster-prone members of Delta House, the worst fraternity on a fictional college campus in 1962. Why set it in 1962? Because by 1978 the world the characters in the movie are rebelling against no longer exists. By 1978, the hippie movement had already destroyed everything, but for Animal House to work, they needed something to rebel against. 

So the movie goes back in time before Vietnam protests, hippie culture, and the full collapse of trust in institutions. Animal House needs something to rebel against because that’s how it’s setting up the audience for an Assimilation Rebellion.

An Assimilation  Rebellion is a persuasion technique in which someone is Screenwashed into conformity by forming a rebellion that appears to reject or fight against an institution, system, or authority, but ultimately encourages people to join, support, or become emotionally attached to that same system. 

Here’s how Animal House and the college raunch comedies it spawned persuade audiences into college debt with assimilation rebellion, step by step. 

• Step One: Show the institution you want your audience to join as boring,  oppressive, or even corrupt.

That’s right: before we can get people to go to college, we have to make it seem like it sucks. Animal House does that with a Dean who’s a hypocrite and a system of straight-laced fraternities that oppose all sorts of fun. 

It’s basic stuff, but the film goes out of its way to make everything about college seem joyless and empty. The fraternities playing by the rules are stiff, formulaic, and they don’t seem to be happy. They’re angry and totally corrupt

Donald Sutherland plays a professor in the movie, and during the only classroom scene shown in it, he confesses he finds what he’s teaching boring and suggests it’s pointless. Even the staff doesn’t seem enthusiastic about this whole college thing and the ones who do, like the Dean, are portrayed as extremely stupid. 

• Step Two: Introduce charismatic rebels inside that institution.

Give the audience characters who break the rules yet remain within the system’s boundaries. Attach pleasure, freedom, status, humor, and belonging to the rebels.

Animal House is built around Delta House, a rebellious frat full of charismatic, drunken louts designed primarily to appeal to the sensibilities of the working class. It’s a template followed by nearly every college raunch comedy that came after, with the only difference being what group the rebel frat is meant to appeal to.

In Revenge of the Nerds, the rebel frat is meant to appeal to, obviously, nerds.

In PCU it’s Gen X slackers

In Old School it’s past-their-prime thirty-somethings.

What kinds of people populate the rebel frat changes depending on what group is being propagandized, but they’re always portrayed as lovable, wild-partying, outside-the-box thinkers.

• Step Three: Reward the internal rebels.

 Let the rebels humiliate authority, win social status, get sex, gain friends, or become legends.

Animal House quickly establishes that being a member of Delta House somehow gives its members total immunity from normal laws, regulations, and morality. When its members steal from a grocery store, a clerk catches them and then just waves them on, because they’re Delta.

When our rebel “heroes” abandon their girlfriends to be “assaulted” by “large men” at a club, the girls don’t even seem that mad about it and just walk home by themselves without complaining about what was done to them. 

Delta is even immune from the ire of its own members. Flounder briefly has a steady girlfriend in the film, and when he introduces her to his frat brothers, they immediately seduce her and sleep with her behind Flounder’s back. 

Flounder doesn’t seem to mind; he doesn’t even complain. Instead, he joins in the various assaults being perpetrated on other women by his frat brothers throughout the rest of the film. If you’re in Delta, you can literally do anything at all. 

If you haven’t seen Animal House, I need to be extremely clear here. This isn’t the normal, boys-will-be-boys partying you might have seen in the college comedies this movie inspired. There’s nothing innocent about anything in Animal House, and that’s on purpose. The movie goes to immoral and illegal extremes to prove to you that by joining a college, you can literally get away with anything.

It’s so extreme that the film’s primary protagonist, a twenty-something-year-old man, knowingly sleeps with the Mayor’s 13-year-old daughter after getting her black-out drunk, and nothing is done about it. Instead, the movie presents this horror as awesome and seems to suggest that the audience should consider trying something similar.

The fact that, in the era of #MeToo, Animal House is not only still available to stream freely but also doesn’t even have one of those annoying warning labels about outdated content in front of it should tell you a lot about how important this movie is to the institutions around it.

It’s worth noting that Revenge of the Nerds is not available to watch on streaming, having been canceled for an only slightly less horrific scene in which an adult woman is lured into intimacy under false pretenses.

Meanwhile, every frame of Animal House is basically frat-house Epstein Island, and everyone in our culture is fine with it. They have to be, because Animal House is the pillar on which the modern college myth was constructed. Pull out that pillar and the whole thing collapses.

• Step Four: Don’t present escape from the system as an option; instead, make rebelling a lifestyle.

In Animal House, as in every college raunch comedy, the hero frat is composed of guys who basically do nothing but sit around partying. They don’t attend college classes, play sports, or hang out in the quad. They just hang out in a group home, getting drunk.

So when these lazy hedonists run afoul of campus regulations, you’d think they’d all just shrug and move the party to a different house, since none of them were really attending college anyway. You can literally party anywhere.

That never happens. It never even occurs to them. Instead, the group fights desperately to stay in the very system they’re against, though there’s no reason for them to be there. 

There are variations on this. For instance, in Old School, people who aren’t already part of the college to begin with fight to get in. But they aren’t fighting to get in and take math classes; they want to hold topless wrestling matches in their basement. Something you don’t need college enrollment to do.

• Step Five: Leave the institution intact.

The system survives, but now it looks cooler because a rebellion happened inside it.

In Animal House, we never explicitly see what happens to the college after Delta House’s rebellion. But the movie ends with a note that tells us what happened to each member, making it clear that they were eventually all let back in, got their degrees despite never attending classes, and that everything worked out fine.

Other movies spend more time on showing the aftermath of the rebellion. The result is always the same. Everyone resumes attending college, only it’s more fun now.

They get all the status and income promised by college, but get it by doing nothing that resembles studying. The classic college raunch comedy’s protagonists do drugs, commit crimes, and bang sorority girls. Then they graduate.

When they’re done, the college is still there, ready for the next class of hedonistic criminals. It’s still there, ready for you.

• Step Six: Transfer the audience’s affection.

With the Assimilation Rebellion arc complete, the audience now falls in love with the idea of college itself. Because none of this could happen without that system, and hedonism without any consequences looks like a lot of fun. 

You don’t really have to conform man, you can go and be an independent free thinker just like all the other independent free thinkers there who just happen to be independently free thinking exactly the same things as everyone else. Conformity becomes liberation. Rebellion becomes assimilation. That’s an Assimilation Rebellion. 

The College Lie Is Collapsing Too Slowly

Luckily, the lie started by Animal House and transmitted by its successors is starting to collapse in on itself. A few people are, finally, starting to realize that allowing kids who can’t legally rent a car, drink alcohol, get a tattoo, or purchase a lottery ticket to take on long-term predatory loans and pause their lives for four years in the hopes of assaulting a minor may not be a good idea.

Yet, it’s not happening fast enough. 55% of men were still attending college after high school in 2024, down from a high of 60% in 2020. Women seem to be going in the opposite direction, with 70% of them attending college, up from 67% in 2020.

There have been recent attempts to tweak the standard college-deserves-all-your-money narrative to account for the fact that people have begun to notice it doesn’t deliver on its promises. Netflix, for instance, recently released an entire series designed to screenwash audiences into believing that college is only good when it’s totally useless. 

I did a full video on this one; you’ll have to see it all to believe it. 

Unfortunately, tactics like this are working to deflect from secondary education criticism. Though there are now a few objectors, for most, college still seems like a foregone conclusion, despite the fact that there’s no longer any real evidence that it helps improve people’s future job prospects or in any way contributes to their long-term happiness. Despite the fact that you’re almost certainly not going to bang a hot sorority girl and will most definitely go to jail if you rob a grocery store. 

Congratulations, future college debt slaves: You’ve been screenwashed.