Or, as Glenn Reynolds has been recommending for a long time, the Ivy League entire.
‘Dumb College Kids’ Have Been Supporting Mass Murder for a Hundred Years
We broke up the KKK, it may be time to break up Harvard.One of the people watching college students cheer Hamas and tear down posters of kidnapped Israeli children commented that this was not just “dumb kids wearing Che t-shirts”.
But it is.
The ‘dumb college kids wearing Che t-shirts” were supporting mass murder, atrocities and ethnic cleansing in Latin America. They were cheering on the murder of women and children. And an international Communist movement responsible for the deaths of millions.
Before they were supporting Hamas, they were backing BLM while cities burned, streets filled with broken glass and people were violently assaulted. And before BLM, there was Mumia Abu Jamal and the Gitmo terrorists, further back there were the Sandinistas, the PLO, the Weathermen, the BLA and the Viet Cong. And before them Mao and the Bolsheviks.
‘Dumb college kids’ have been supporting the mass murder of millions for at least a century.
There is something different here.
Never before have the atrocities been as graphically documented with so many videos taken by the monsters themselves committing their crimes that were broadly distributed in graphic and gory detail to the public in ways that could not be censored or suppressed.
The victims of Marxist dictatorships or the Soviet Union and China were mostly faceless figures, sometimes caught in grainy black and white photos, often with no names or backstories. Here there are full color photos and videos, personal stories of families, mothers and children, and the elderly, all looking from the ‘Kidnapped’ posters being torn down from college campus walls.
But the smiling children looking back from the posters might as well have been kulaks in Russia or intellectuals in Cambodia for all the empathy they elicited. Seeing them only infuriates college kids busy righteously advocating for Hamas as a queer liberation movement. It spoils their plans for a class walkout while chanting, “Free Palestine” and waving their puny fists in the air conditioned air.
Hamas understood that documenting its atrocities would make it more appealing, not only to fellow Islamists, but also to leftists. The ‘dumb college kids’ aren’t alienated by atrocities, they’re drawn to them. And it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the last century to think otherwise.
Morality doesn’t come from the absence of standards, but the insistence on them.
Americans spend countless billions each year subsidizing higher education. We deserve more from universities and from their graduates. What we are seeing is not just an immediate failure, but a century of betrayal by academia which has been serving up apologetics for politically correct mass murder since the days of Lenin and Stalin. When its views are unpopular, it hides behind free speech, and when it feels its strength, it purges dissenting students and professors.
The greatest extremist threat in this country isn’t coming from a few KKK members living in trailer parks, but from the nation’s most prestigious Ivy League universities. It’s time for either academia to rethink its relationship to political extremism or for the country to rethink its relationship to a system of higher education that teaches students to support mass murder.
The Nazi party had its strongest base of support in German universities. As did the Communists of the Soviet Union. Our ‘Hitler Youth’ on both sides of the political spectrum are invariably college graduates. We broke up the KKK, it may be time to break up Harvard.
All fine and well, sure. But even physically dismantling every building, dormitory, and tool shed on campus misses the central issue: this is not a brick-and-mortar problem, it’s an intellectual and moral one.
Unless and until we acknowledge that Leftist ideology is not merely incompatible with Constitutional liberty, free will, and traditional American values but actively, implacably hostile to them, we’re still just pissing in the wind. This is not just some difference of opinion, resolvable through civil debate, discussion, and/or compromise.
Ultimately, what we have here is an existential struggle against real, indelible, upper-case Evil—no more, no less. Restraint, tolerance, and gentlemanly forbearance will never suffice in such a struggle as this. The goal cannot be to defeat Leftism, but to destroy it utterly. Stop short of that, and we lose.