Don’t save Democrats from their own campus disaster

My dear conservative friends, we need to have a talk. This is more of an intervention than anything else. You must stop protecting institutions that are committed to destroying your way of life. The university system hates you. It always has. It will continue to hate you until it is dismantled brick by brick and replaced with something else. Something better. The universities will just never be into you, and if two factions of the left want to destroy themselves while shutting down college campuses, that’s what we in politics like to call a win.

You don’t need to ride to the rescue. You aren’t the white knight in this scenario. Just grab some popcorn and enjoy the show; I promise this will work out in your favor if you let it.

Protests surrounding the Hamas terror attack on October 7 in Gaza and the subsequent response by Israel have now raged on college campuses across the country for weeks. The establishment left is nominally pro-Israel due to a legacy attachment to the nation and the need to maintain a healthy relationship with major donors. The more radical leftist vanguard has drunk deeply from the well of wokeness and made the natural connection between anti-European decolonization rhetoric and Israel, which it now identifies as a white colonial oppressor.

Jews have been stalwart Democratic voters for a long time and have avoided being dropped to the bottom of the party’s oppression hierarchy, but that arrangement is now being called into question by other members of the coalition. The left has imported and elevated a generation of immigrants who feel no attachment to America’s past relationship with Israel, and many in the vanguard come from cultures that are openly hostile to the Jewish nation.

The progressive coalition has always been tenuous, and October 7 created an eruption across the most critical fault line that has manifested as an intra-leftist civil war playing out on college campuses.

Most opposing political parties would recognize this as a gift from on high. The Republicans, on the other hand, have several specific hang-ups that compel them to solve this problem for their opponents.

The conservative impulse to protect institutions is an admirable one. In a healthy society, institutions are the formal structures that help to enshrine a culture’s values and transmit them to the next generation. But American society is not healthy, and the long march through the institutions perpetrated by the left has installed a hostile ideology deep into the heart of the university system.

College campuses are not places of learning where promising young minds develop the leadership skills necessary to forge a brighter future. These institutions are progressive seminaries where students go deeply into debt to learn how to hate their parents, religion, and nation. This ideological poison is then distributed through every major corporation, piece of entertainment, and news headline as college graduates take their places as leaders and managers throughout society.

Conservatives have complained for decades that the public schools are hostile indoctrination centers designed to secure leftist hegemony, but when the pandemic shut down these enemy institutions, conservatives became the most vocal proponents of reopening them.

The same dynamic is currently playing itself out on university campuses. Conservatives may complain about the education system, but they are ultimately defenders of the status quo and would rather see these institutions continue to operate, even if they are calling for the literal destruction of the United States.

Part of this response is linked to the natural and admirable conservative impulse toward order. Conservatives recoil at the idea of violence and intimidation on these campuses, and where Republican governors are in charge, they should absolutely protect the physical safety of all students.

But there is also an impulse among many Republican politicians to punish public criticism of Israel, and this is a serious problem.

The right has spent endless hours mocking the leftist ideas of hate speech and safe spaces, but now many GOP politicians are suddenly obsessed with implementing exactly those policies. Governors like Greg Abbott of Texas and Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma, for example, have come out in favor of cracking down on “hate speech” and anti-Semitism in the wake of these protests. It is becoming hard not to notice that most of these politicians took no action as anti-white rhetoric and demonstrations dominated academia for the last decade, to the point where that ideology has now made its way into several best-selling books.

Read the rest at the Blaze