Thanks to the Hamas-sponsored anti-Jewish and anti-Israel rallies happening on college campuses right now, what were once monolithically progressive and Biden-supporting Democrat enclaves in our country are quickly morphing into energetic Trump 2024 rallies. We are witnessing a nationwide tutorial on how to turn disinterested, pleasure-seeking youths into rabid Trump supporters.
What had seemed like an indestructible progressive monolith on campus has revealed some cracks, emboldening (finally) the sane commonsense students in their midst. They have learned that their progressive opponents aren’t very smart or well-informed, and their campus hegemony is not inevitable. Talk about unintended consequences. President Trump must be an evil genius after all.
Trump couldn’t have planned this any better. Could anything have inspired the graduating seniors at the University of Michigan, hardly a bastion of conservatism, to break out in chants of “USA, USA”? Probably nothing, except an interruption of their graduation ceremony by protesters from Black Lives Matters and Hamas. If those two groups join forces on America’s college campuses and take their show on the road for a tour of America’s cities this summer, get ready for a Trump landslide in November. Meanwhile, down at Louisiana State University and other southern schools, where one would expect such a reaction, a large crowd of students drowned out a Hamas protest with the same loud chants of “USA, USA.”
Republicans and conservatives generally have been unable to pull the masks off the rabid Marxists who run America’s universities to reveal their hateful ideology. Colleges have fought off attacks on their indoctrination of America’s youth by hiding behind credentialism and an aura of invincibility. It had started to seem like they were truly untouchable. But left-wing rallies are being overwhelmed by a tide of counterprotesters who believe in this country, who believe in truth and decency, and who are disgusted with the actions and hateful ideas of the radical rabble in the Hamas villages on our campuses.
What is being revealed in these Hamas villages? A university pedagogy based on “othering,” a pedagogy of grievance, of blame. In modern academic scholarship, soaked in racist paradigms and theories of oppression, someone is always getting screwed. Nothing is ever anyone’s fault. If you are in an oppressed group, you never have to take responsibility for your actions. If you’re oppressed, you have every right to be angry at your so-called oppressors, an anger which, continually stoked by ivory-tower academics and oppression-industry “sages,” quickly morphs into hate for the other party, the perceived oppressor.
$1.2 billion in federal funding last year alone. Why do federal tax dollars support a private university with an almost $14 billion endowment that charges close to $80,000 per year in tuition? Some GOP senators, including Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN) are advocating to cut federal funding for colleges hosting anti-Semitic protests. Even talk show host Bill Maher recently criticized Biden’s latest student loan bailout by saying that Maher’s “tax dollars” are funding “Jew hating.”
We cannot let this moment pass. Things must change on campus. The academic curriculum that creates a culture of hate, fueled by DEI mandarins and woke administrators, must be dismantled along with the Hamas villages. Hate must give way to intellectual inquiry, real inquiry founded on respect for others and the search for truth. We cannot let these protests die while the system that created them remains.
The biggest enemy of freedom is a manufactured groupthink. Anyone paying attention to our college campuses knows that progressive groupthink has been metastasizing there for decades, but we finally have a cause that demonstrates the extent of the rot. An illiberal band of murderers, who declare their desire to kill Jewish American citizens, a terrorist organization that committed unspeakable atrocities in their October 7 attack, has the full support of many American college students for a cause they don’t understand. “From the river to the sea!” What river? What sea? Many student protesters can’t even answer that.
Some protesters can’t even spell Palestine, as we saw in recent graffiti on campus. The students display little intellectual curiosity, and their educators have no interest in teaching the kids how to think. Only what to think. Protesters claim that Jews — even American Jews — are “pro-genocide,” a typical Hamas talking point, without any evidence of the mass, targeted killing of civilians by Israeli forces. In reality, the military response of Israel to the barbarous attack on them on October 7 has shown remarkable precision and restraint. But facts don’t matter anymore.
I saw a glimmer of hope in an interview at Semafor this week by Ben Smith, one of journalism’s well-connected palace guards, of New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn, in which Smith asked him why he doesn’t see it as his job to help elect Joe Biden. Kahn replied that the Times was not an “instrument” for the Biden campaign. He said that there are people in the country who might elect Trump in November, and they have the democratic right to do so. And he noted that the coverage of Trump in 2020 went “too far,” was too determined to actively undermine Trump. Choosing reality over indoctrination in the news is a breath of fresh air in today’s stifling leftist intellectual environment.
We must hold our students and universities to a higher standard. We as a nation cannot fund the intellectual beggaring of our children. The first impulse of a proper education should be understanding, not prejudice; it should be sympathy, not destruction. Break up the Hamas villages and defund the universities that spawned them. We must rediscover dialogue and disagreement, point and counterpoint. If we simply play the blame game, the only currency any of us will trade in is hate.
Image: Ted Eytan
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