David Brooks Says that the Universities are the Crown Jewels of American Life. That’s Baloney

In a recent op-ed essay in the New York Times, David Brooks called for a “civic uprising” against the Trump administration. Brook envisions a revolt of the intellectual elites, including those who hang out in the universities, which he described as “the crown jewels of American life.”

The universities, Brooks extols, “are hubs of scientific and entrepreneurial innovation,” and “[i]n a million ways, the scholars at universities help us understand ourselves and our world.”

Brooks goes so far as to attest that the universities mold young students to become cultured, critical thinkers:

I have seen it over and over. A kid comes on campus as a freshman, inquisitive but unformed. By senior year, there is something impressive about her. She is awakened, cultured, [and] a critical thinker. The universities have performed their magic once again.

I’m sorry, David, but that’s pure, unadulterated bullshit. As the media shows us daily, the universities are not nurturing students to be cultured, critical thinkers. They’re producing anti-Semitic racists who rampage through college campuses spewing venomous hatred toward Jews.

If the universities were doing their jobs, they would be educating young people to think rationally and to have some understanding of Israel’s heroic struggle to maintain the only democratic society in the Middle East. Instead, anti-Israel student protesters voice their support for Hamas--a gang of rapists, torturers, kidnappers, body snatchers, arsonists, and-child killers.

Moreover, if the nation’s university leaders were compassionate champions of social justice, which they claim to be, they would not be hiking tuition year after year, forcing their students to take on ruinous levels of debt to obtain liberal arts and humanities degrees that are worthless.

To be fair, Brooks admits that American universities have flaws. “Many have allowed themselves to become shrouded in a stifling progressivism that tells half the country: ‘Your voices don’t matter.’”

Brooks fails to acknowledge that the “flaw” he describes as “stifling progressivism” is not a quaint and harmless eccentricity. It is an expression of the universities’ bigotry, provincialism, and base contempt for traditional American values.

In short, Brooks is wrong to say that American universities are advancing “the glories of our way of life.” On the contrary, the gasbags who run the colleges and teach in them are programming their students to be intolerant, racist, simplistic, and self-absorbed. And they’re charging a boatload of money for the privilege of destroying American culture. 

An anti-Israel encampment at Columbia: "the glories of our way of life"

Is Anti-Semitism the New Orthodoxy? Reflections on George Orwell's 1984 and the Attack on DNC Headquarters

Yesterday, a mob of anti-Israel protesters stormed the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington DC. CNN might describe this altercation as “mostly peaceful,” but the video images I watched showed protesters battling with police.

Who are these anti-Israel agitators? Why this explosion of anti-Semitism? Do these fools know anything about the history of Israel? Have they forgotten about the Holocaust? Have they no sympathy for the Israelis who were murdered and raped by Hamas terrorists on October 7^th?

Yesterday’s attack on the DNC headquarters reminded me of a passage from 1984, George Orwell’s dystopian novel. Orwell described a daily “Two Minutes of Hate” exercise, which the bureaucrats of fictional Oceana were required to attend.

The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. . . . A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledgehammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.

Curiously, Orwell continued, the hatred that the bureaucrats expressed was impersonal. “[T]he rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blow lamp.”

Likewise, there is an abstract quality to the recent outbursts of anti-Semitism; the racial hatred is not directed at any particular person. And yet, there is an element of cunning in these explosive, racist rants against Israel. The rioters seem to know that it is now acceptable to hate Jews. Anti-Semitism has suddenly become the new orthodoxy—almost overnight. Even the universities have signaled that they will tolerate their students’ open hostility toward Jews and Israel.

“Orthodoxy,” Orwell reminds us, “means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.” Indeed, there is a thoughtlessness that permeates the new orthodoxy—much like the thoughtlessness of the German people as the Nazis came to power. Non-Jewish Germans tolerated the persecution of  Jews because they believed the Nazis would direct their bestiality only toward Jews.

Later, Germans learned that Nazi brutality knew no bounds. Anyone who opposed Hitler's murderous agenda would be liquidated.

I say again that anti-Semitism is intolerable in the United States.  The District of Columbia should prosecute the rioters who attacked the DNC headquarters as vigorously as they prosecuted the January 6th rioters. The universities should expel students who publicly espouse anti-Semitism, and they should fire the professors who spout racist propaganda in their classrooms.

 

"Mostly peaceful"
Photo credit: The Mirror