For many years, American conservatives used to point out examples of liberal hypocrisy by drawing attention to some offensive or outrageous thing that the Left had done, but that had gone unreported or otherwise tolerated by the media, then saying, “If conservatives had done that, you would have raised hell.” The idea was to shame liberals into reforming themselves to become fair and balanced.
It rarely worked, but it’s not hard to see why it might have done, back when the Left at least paid lip service to liberal principles. That’s ancient history. The reason to do it today—the only reason—is to reveal to the Right how decadent the systems that govern our societies have become, and to make clear the grave challenges before us.
Case in point: the horrifying eruption of antisemitism on American university campuses, especially the most elite ones.
In the summer of 2017, a relatively small group of young far-right activists descended on the university town of Charlottesville, Virginia, for a so-called Unite The Right rally. The torch-bearing marchers were a motley crew of fascists, neo-Nazis, and assorted racists and Jew-haters. The Virginia governor declared a state of emergency prior to the rally. During the event, which was widely covered by U.S. media, a young radical rammed his car into a crowd of protesters, killing one and injuring 35 others.
The reaction was massive. Banks and corporations refused to do business with those associated with the march. Twitter users led a campaign to name and shame participants. When then-President Donald Trump, in his statement condemning the protesters, seemed to equivocate slightly about their badness, he stood repeatedly and vociferously condemned for it by the media, lasting throughout the rest of his presidency. The widespread reaction to Unite the Right suppressed the white nationalist movement.
Well and good—but it should be noted that its members were marginal figures who held no power in American society. As evil as they unquestionably were, they mostly served as useful idiots giving a Left panicked by the new president in the White House an excuse to catastrophize, and use their demonstration as a reason to demonize all things Trump.
Fast forward to the current moment. At Columbia University in New York, massive rallies have been taking place nightly on campus. The supposed cause is to protest Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, but the protests, which have reached a hysterical level, have turned blatantly antisemitic. Hundreds of demonstrators chant slogans supporting Hamas, the genocidal Islamist organization responsible for slaughtering over 1,000 Israeli civilians last October 7. Over the weekend, the campus’ Orthodox rabbi urged Jewish students to flee campus for their own safety.
Jonathan Lederer, a Jewish student who was part of a small group of students peacefully standing up for Israel in the face of mob violence, was physically attacked (you can see video of it in his account of the event). Someone in the mob screamed, “Go back to Poland!”
This is happening not in Nazi Germany, but in the United States of America, in a city that is home to more Jews than live in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem combined. And it is happening not at some minor red-state college, but at an Ivy League university, one of the most prestigious in America.
And not only at Columbia. Another clip shows Yale University students shouting, “Viva, viva, Palestina!” as an American flag is lowered over campus. Clips widely available on social media show Yale protesters blasting a rap song with the lyrics:
F*ck Israel, Israel a b*tch / B*tch we out here mobbin’ on some Palestine sh*t / Free Palestine b*tch, Israel gon’ die b*tch / N*gga it’s they land why you out here tryna rob it / Bullsh*t prophets, y’all just want the profit
Also at Yale over the weekend, pro-Palestinian students formed a human chain to prevent a Jewish student from walking through campus. And over the weekend, a Jewish reporter for the campus newspaper who was covering the pro-Hamas demonstrations there suffered a stab wound in the eye by a protester. She told the New York Post that when she reported it to campus police, they told her they couldn’t do anything about it. Sahar Tartak, the reporter, tweeted from the hospital, “This is what happens when visibly Jewish students try to attend and document these rallies.”
(You might have seen the recent video clip from London, in which a Metropolitan police officer threatened to arrest a Jewish man wearing a kippah as a provocateur to the pro-Hamas crowd marching by. That’s right: these days, you face potential arrest in London for walking while Jewish.)
Are Europeans aware of all this? Probably not. Most Americans likely aren’t either. In contrast with the wall-to-wall coverage of the 2017 far-right Charlottesville rally, even before the fatal attack there, media attention to the obscene events at Columbia and elsewhere has been muted. The New York Times’ story paid as much attention to Jewish students who said events at Columbia are no big deal as it did to the outrageous attacks on Jews there. This should be no surprise, given what the 2020 staff drama inside the newspaper revealed about the illiberal left-wing biases of many of the paper’s journalists. These days, many U.S. journalists behave as if their job is less to report the news as it is to manage the ‘Narrative’ to confirm left-wing talking points.
At least NYT covered it. The Washington Post, which serves the American capital, had nothing about the hateful protests on its digital front page as of Monday. CNN’s front page has a small item about Columbia’s Orthodox rabbi, showcased as prominently as a story about a Taiwanese drag queen reality show, and less prominently than a piece about washing black people’s hair.
On the news websites of the major U.S. television networks, the protests are barely visible. “Columbia University protests continue for 5th day” reads the tiny headline on CBSNews.com. The story itself is unobjectionable. The point is that these astonishing events—openly antisemitic mass protests, some involving anti-Jewish violence, in support of Islamist terrorism—happening on elite university campuses are treated as a minor occurrence.
If you attended the National Conservatism conference in Brussels last week, you know how this works. On orders of a district mayor, police attempted to shut down the conference. It took an emergency ruling of the Belgian supreme court to protect the free speech and assembly rights of the gathered conservatives. Yet if the event was covered at all by the media, it was downplayed as a mere dust-up. Politico even took the opportunity to make fun of the catering at the event, ignoring the fact that it was difficult to get any food at all into the gathering, because of the police line and Antifa threats to suppliers serving the conference.
To draw contrasts between the way our media and others in the establishment treated Unite the Right in 2017, versus the way they are treating this horrific explosion of antisemitism in much larger and more widespread protests on elite university campuses, is to educate conservatives and others about the actual conditions of life in our liberal democracies today.
“If Donald Trump has to answer for Charlottesville, why doesn’t Joe Biden have to answer for Columbia University,” tweeted one conservative. “The answer to that one is the key to figuring out our entire current media infrastructure.”
It’s not only the media. At Northwestern University in Chicago, the dean of students attended a protest targeting Hillel, the Jewish campus ministry, demanding that the university end its relationship with the organization. Columbia’s leadership has condemned antisemitism, but some faculty have spoken out in defense of the protesters. A clip circulating on Twitter features a non-student pro-Palestinian protester saying that Serene Jones, the head of the left-wing Union Theological Seminary on campus, convinced Columbia security to let her into the demonstrators’ scrum. Clearly the fanatics on the quads have support from tenured radicals.
Contrast current events with the spasms of hysteria that swept Yale’s campus in October 2015. Back then, left-wing students and their allies fell into hysterics after a professor suggested in an email that the university should not police student Halloween costumes. They wailed and gnashed their teeth (see this, for example) about how “unsafe” they felt on campus. Yale president Peter Salovey met with the grieving students, and said in response, “I do not want anyone in our community to feel alone, disrespected, or unsafe.”
With the backing of a majority of Yale faculty, Salovey’s administration capitulated, throwing more money at ‘diversity’ initiatives. Erika Christakis, the lecturer whose email about Halloween costumes caused the row, left the university.
This past weekend, when faced with a far more substantial crisis, the most Salovey could muster was a stern email sent to campus, saying that Yale will discipline students who have broken the rules in their protest. Fine, I guess, but makes for a staggering contrast to Salovey’s active engagement in the 2015 incident, in which he fell all over himself to demonstrate sympathy to students who felt at risk on campus from, yes, a professor who wrote that students should be free to wear Halloween costumes of their choosing.
Note well that these same students at top universities are the next generation of the ruling class. Just as the soixante-huitards in Europe, and their co-generationalists in North America, later became the politicians and institutional leaders, these radicalized students will be administering the systems tomorrow.
True, it is in one sense satisfying to observe institutions like the Ivy League colleges suffer these outpourings of hatred and hysteria, given that they have cultivated the woke ideology at the core of these protests. These institutions abandoned classical liberalism, and taught students to judge good and evil according to identity politics. They are getting what they deserve.
More important, however, is that we are all watching the disintegration of the most important institutions within Western democracies. It beggars belief that we are all witness now to the rise of open and proud antisemitism made manifest in the most elite universities of America. It beggars belief that in London, Paris, and other European capitals, Jews are afraid to walk in public for fear of violent Islamism (aided and abetted by left-wing allies), while authorities protect the antisemites. It beggars belief that the mainstream media either downplays this or ignores it entirely, and that the political class, so sensitive to the slightest tremor of upset from the Left’s sacred victims, is largely docile in the face of this crisis.
The Democratic Party meets this summer in Chicago for the convention in which it will renominate Joe Biden. Pro-Hamas activists have vowed to make a big show there, replaying the 1968 Democratic convention in that city, at which violent protests, and police violence to repress the protests, resulted in the election of Republican Richard M. Nixon on a law-and-order platform.
The radicals may get Donald Trump re-elected this fall. If so, the country that Trump will attempt to govern—unlike the America that Nixon inherited—is one in which confidence in liberal democratic institutions has been hollowed out. We have all seen too much. We have seen how the woke have conquered all the high ground in U.S. institutional life (the story is the same in Europe, save for Hungary). We have seen the double standards in action in far too many instances to have firm confidence that this corrupt leadership class is capable of meaningful reform.
“We are facing a moment that is as big as 1914, or worse,” an economist said to me recently, about the general decadence. Yes. What is happening now on America’s elite campuses may be the birth pangs of something very ugly—either of the Left or the Right, it’s hard to say—slouching towards Bethlehem to be born. If so, then remember this: the ideological and institutional fertility of the Left, and the feeble sterility of the parties of the Right, will have collaborated to produce a monster.
The signs of his advent were all around us, early on, but our media class preferred not to see them. It comforted itself with the thought that if it just pointed and shouted, “Look! Orban! Le Pen!” loud enough and often enough, it would distract themselves and the masses from the real threats to law and liberty. And God help us, they might have been right.
The Birth Pangs of a New Order
Student Protests at Columbia University. Alex Kent / AFP
For many years, American conservatives used to point out examples of liberal hypocrisy by drawing attention to some offensive or outrageous thing that the Left had done, but that had gone unreported or otherwise tolerated by the media, then saying, “If conservatives had done that, you would have raised hell.” The idea was to shame liberals into reforming themselves to become fair and balanced.
It rarely worked, but it’s not hard to see why it might have done, back when the Left at least paid lip service to liberal principles. That’s ancient history. The reason to do it today—the only reason—is to reveal to the Right how decadent the systems that govern our societies have become, and to make clear the grave challenges before us.
Case in point: the horrifying eruption of antisemitism on American university campuses, especially the most elite ones.
In the summer of 2017, a relatively small group of young far-right activists descended on the university town of Charlottesville, Virginia, for a so-called Unite The Right rally. The torch-bearing marchers were a motley crew of fascists, neo-Nazis, and assorted racists and Jew-haters. The Virginia governor declared a state of emergency prior to the rally. During the event, which was widely covered by U.S. media, a young radical rammed his car into a crowd of protesters, killing one and injuring 35 others.
The reaction was massive. Banks and corporations refused to do business with those associated with the march. Twitter users led a campaign to name and shame participants. When then-President Donald Trump, in his statement condemning the protesters, seemed to equivocate slightly about their badness, he stood repeatedly and vociferously condemned for it by the media, lasting throughout the rest of his presidency. The widespread reaction to Unite the Right suppressed the white nationalist movement.
Well and good—but it should be noted that its members were marginal figures who held no power in American society. As evil as they unquestionably were, they mostly served as useful idiots giving a Left panicked by the new president in the White House an excuse to catastrophize, and use their demonstration as a reason to demonize all things Trump.
Fast forward to the current moment. At Columbia University in New York, massive rallies have been taking place nightly on campus. The supposed cause is to protest Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, but the protests, which have reached a hysterical level, have turned blatantly antisemitic. Hundreds of demonstrators chant slogans supporting Hamas, the genocidal Islamist organization responsible for slaughtering over 1,000 Israeli civilians last October 7. Over the weekend, the campus’ Orthodox rabbi urged Jewish students to flee campus for their own safety.
Jonathan Lederer, a Jewish student who was part of a small group of students peacefully standing up for Israel in the face of mob violence, was physically attacked (you can see video of it in his account of the event). Someone in the mob screamed, “Go back to Poland!”
This is happening not in Nazi Germany, but in the United States of America, in a city that is home to more Jews than live in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem combined. And it is happening not at some minor red-state college, but at an Ivy League university, one of the most prestigious in America.
And not only at Columbia. Another clip shows Yale University students shouting, “Viva, viva, Palestina!” as an American flag is lowered over campus. Clips widely available on social media show Yale protesters blasting a rap song with the lyrics:
Also at Yale over the weekend, pro-Palestinian students formed a human chain to prevent a Jewish student from walking through campus. And over the weekend, a Jewish reporter for the campus newspaper who was covering the pro-Hamas demonstrations there suffered a stab wound in the eye by a protester. She told the New York Post that when she reported it to campus police, they told her they couldn’t do anything about it. Sahar Tartak, the reporter, tweeted from the hospital, “This is what happens when visibly Jewish students try to attend and document these rallies.”
(You might have seen the recent video clip from London, in which a Metropolitan police officer threatened to arrest a Jewish man wearing a kippah as a provocateur to the pro-Hamas crowd marching by. That’s right: these days, you face potential arrest in London for walking while Jewish.)
Are Europeans aware of all this? Probably not. Most Americans likely aren’t either. In contrast with the wall-to-wall coverage of the 2017 far-right Charlottesville rally, even before the fatal attack there, media attention to the obscene events at Columbia and elsewhere has been muted. The New York Times’ story paid as much attention to Jewish students who said events at Columbia are no big deal as it did to the outrageous attacks on Jews there. This should be no surprise, given what the 2020 staff drama inside the newspaper revealed about the illiberal left-wing biases of many of the paper’s journalists. These days, many U.S. journalists behave as if their job is less to report the news as it is to manage the ‘Narrative’ to confirm left-wing talking points.
At least NYT covered it. The Washington Post, which serves the American capital, had nothing about the hateful protests on its digital front page as of Monday. CNN’s front page has a small item about Columbia’s Orthodox rabbi, showcased as prominently as a story about a Taiwanese drag queen reality show, and less prominently than a piece about washing black people’s hair.
On the news websites of the major U.S. television networks, the protests are barely visible. “Columbia University protests continue for 5th day” reads the tiny headline on CBSNews.com. The story itself is unobjectionable. The point is that these astonishing events—openly antisemitic mass protests, some involving anti-Jewish violence, in support of Islamist terrorism—happening on elite university campuses are treated as a minor occurrence.
If you attended the National Conservatism conference in Brussels last week, you know how this works. On orders of a district mayor, police attempted to shut down the conference. It took an emergency ruling of the Belgian supreme court to protect the free speech and assembly rights of the gathered conservatives. Yet if the event was covered at all by the media, it was downplayed as a mere dust-up. Politico even took the opportunity to make fun of the catering at the event, ignoring the fact that it was difficult to get any food at all into the gathering, because of the police line and Antifa threats to suppliers serving the conference.
To draw contrasts between the way our media and others in the establishment treated Unite the Right in 2017, versus the way they are treating this horrific explosion of antisemitism in much larger and more widespread protests on elite university campuses, is to educate conservatives and others about the actual conditions of life in our liberal democracies today.
“If Donald Trump has to answer for Charlottesville, why doesn’t Joe Biden have to answer for Columbia University,” tweeted one conservative. “The answer to that one is the key to figuring out our entire current media infrastructure.”
It’s not only the media. At Northwestern University in Chicago, the dean of students attended a protest targeting Hillel, the Jewish campus ministry, demanding that the university end its relationship with the organization. Columbia’s leadership has condemned antisemitism, but some faculty have spoken out in defense of the protesters. A clip circulating on Twitter features a non-student pro-Palestinian protester saying that Serene Jones, the head of the left-wing Union Theological Seminary on campus, convinced Columbia security to let her into the demonstrators’ scrum. Clearly the fanatics on the quads have support from tenured radicals.
Contrast current events with the spasms of hysteria that swept Yale’s campus in October 2015. Back then, left-wing students and their allies fell into hysterics after a professor suggested in an email that the university should not police student Halloween costumes. They wailed and gnashed their teeth (see this, for example) about how “unsafe” they felt on campus. Yale president Peter Salovey met with the grieving students, and said in response, “I do not want anyone in our community to feel alone, disrespected, or unsafe.”
With the backing of a majority of Yale faculty, Salovey’s administration capitulated, throwing more money at ‘diversity’ initiatives. Erika Christakis, the lecturer whose email about Halloween costumes caused the row, left the university.
This past weekend, when faced with a far more substantial crisis, the most Salovey could muster was a stern email sent to campus, saying that Yale will discipline students who have broken the rules in their protest. Fine, I guess, but makes for a staggering contrast to Salovey’s active engagement in the 2015 incident, in which he fell all over himself to demonstrate sympathy to students who felt at risk on campus from, yes, a professor who wrote that students should be free to wear Halloween costumes of their choosing.
Note well that these same students at top universities are the next generation of the ruling class. Just as the soixante-huitards in Europe, and their co-generationalists in North America, later became the politicians and institutional leaders, these radicalized students will be administering the systems tomorrow.
True, it is in one sense satisfying to observe institutions like the Ivy League colleges suffer these outpourings of hatred and hysteria, given that they have cultivated the woke ideology at the core of these protests. These institutions abandoned classical liberalism, and taught students to judge good and evil according to identity politics. They are getting what they deserve.
More important, however, is that we are all watching the disintegration of the most important institutions within Western democracies. It beggars belief that we are all witness now to the rise of open and proud antisemitism made manifest in the most elite universities of America. It beggars belief that in London, Paris, and other European capitals, Jews are afraid to walk in public for fear of violent Islamism (aided and abetted by left-wing allies), while authorities protect the antisemites. It beggars belief that the mainstream media either downplays this or ignores it entirely, and that the political class, so sensitive to the slightest tremor of upset from the Left’s sacred victims, is largely docile in the face of this crisis.
The Democratic Party meets this summer in Chicago for the convention in which it will renominate Joe Biden. Pro-Hamas activists have vowed to make a big show there, replaying the 1968 Democratic convention in that city, at which violent protests, and police violence to repress the protests, resulted in the election of Republican Richard M. Nixon on a law-and-order platform.
The radicals may get Donald Trump re-elected this fall. If so, the country that Trump will attempt to govern—unlike the America that Nixon inherited—is one in which confidence in liberal democratic institutions has been hollowed out. We have all seen too much. We have seen how the woke have conquered all the high ground in U.S. institutional life (the story is the same in Europe, save for Hungary). We have seen the double standards in action in far too many instances to have firm confidence that this corrupt leadership class is capable of meaningful reform.
“We are facing a moment that is as big as 1914, or worse,” an economist said to me recently, about the general decadence. Yes. What is happening now on America’s elite campuses may be the birth pangs of something very ugly—either of the Left or the Right, it’s hard to say—slouching towards Bethlehem to be born. If so, then remember this: the ideological and institutional fertility of the Left, and the feeble sterility of the parties of the Right, will have collaborated to produce a monster.
The signs of his advent were all around us, early on, but our media class preferred not to see them. It comforted itself with the thought that if it just pointed and shouted, “Look! Orban! Le Pen!” loud enough and often enough, it would distract themselves and the masses from the real threats to law and liberty. And God help us, they might have been right.
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