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[Make sure to read Daniel Greenfield’s contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]
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.
The dumb college kids may be dumb, but so was your average Nazi goose stepper or Bolshevik thug. The mobs who clamored to see heads roll around the guillotine were not geniuses. But much like the Gaza civilians that crossed the fence to take part in the murder and rape, they know what they like. And what they like is chaos, violence and seeing things burn.
Your average dumb college kid isn’t born evil because she misses BLM rallies and traded in her black power fist banner for a PLO flag, but neither were the German teens who filled stadiums to listen to Hitler or their Chinese counterparts who giggled while their teachers were beaten during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. As Alinsky said, “a good tactic is one your people enjoy.” And, “If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.”
Consequences are things that come along later. Some people grow up enough to realize that they had been part of something monstrous.
“It was quite fun,” a former Red Guard member recalled. Then she was actually told to beat people and ran away. “God bless me, I didn’t beat anyone back then. If I had beaten anyone how could I have lived with myself all these years?”
Some of the college kids cheering Hamas now may have their moments of reckoning. Or not.
But dismissing them as just ‘dumb college kids’ is how campus extremism becomes softened, normalized and even celebrated. Decades of pop culture turned seventies domestic terrorists into activists who never meant to hurt anyone and were just upset about the Vietnam War. Che went from a symbol of mass murder and repression to slightly edgy youthful rebellion. The old Communists were idealists who wanted to make America into a just and equal society.
These are some of the examples that today’s campus radicals cite when arguing that history will vindicate them. Eventually the bodies are buried and the radical artists and writers turn out to be much more important than all the dead in Russia, China, Cuba and Cambodia. Everyone can name Ernest Hemingway and Noam Chomsky, but who can name a million corpses?
Supporting mass murder isn’t a phase. It’s evil.
The Hitler Youth weren’t just ‘dumb kids’ even if they were dumb kids. Patronizingly dismissing leftist extremism as a phase or a coming of age ritual normalizes our version of the Hitler Youth. And then we wonder at the spectacle of crowds of college kids cheering “armed resistance” against the ‘Zionist occupiers” and wonder over how they could possibly do such things.
What do we think has been the norm on college campuses for at least 50 years?
Liberals utterly failed to draw a red line with the Left. The constant dismissals of leftists as passionate but misguided, as having the right views but the wrong tactics, led to this. The liberals fell to the Left. And then the most extreme parts of the Left cannibalized the rest. College campuses, always radical, became nests of the most extreme politics in the country.
Dismissing all of this as ‘dumb college kids’ or ‘youthful passion’ is how we got here.
An 18-year-old, never mind a 22-year-old, is old enough to go fight a war, yet we act as if he has no moral agency because we’ve accepted the idea that college is a time to test out political extremism. Or at least leftist adjacent political extremism. (College kids advocating for white supremacist groups don’t meet with the same kind of tolerance as advocating for Hamas.)
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.
Dr. Don Rhudy says
I must point out that these are the same youth who fell for the lies of the first GOP administration in 1860 about southern people and slavery. Rather than telling youth directly that their southern neighbors and brother and sister former citizens provided nearly 75 percent of the revenue for the nation, revenue sorely needed by the GOP; or that in order for a union of states to profit from the economic and political model of Mercantilism the form of government must change, creating subordinate states; or that the southern withdrawal of states was legal; in short, rather than tell the truth the GOP lied about the purpose of its war. It painted the southern people as monsters, its new nation as a nation of rebels, and claimed that nation had started the war. It even engineered circumstances such that the last Union fort on Confederate land had to be shelled for the Confederacy to occupy it (though it was nearly empty), as had been previously agreed. That fraud to make it appear the Confederacy started the GOP war. To worsen matters the Union President, the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, not only countenanced war crimes but encouraged them and committed at least one himself. When the war was finally won GOP historians created a Civil War Myth that still is believed.
Is there a difference between the youth (and the adults) who fell for the lies of the GOP between 1860 and 1865 and the youth of today who fall for the lies of the Left’s Propaganda Machine? Or for the adults who still today believe the GOP myth? Or the the national government’s lies about everything it does? Or the national government in those years and the one that exists today? I do not think so. You may try to whitewash the real history beneath the historic myth or what is happening today, but it will not change facts and many Americans, like myself, will find those facts beneath the whitewash. .
Stan says
Wow. I don’t know what kind of Dr. you are but you need some serious medication.
Bruce Crichton says
Slavery was and is completely unproductive.
RS says
God never intended for any man to be a slave! Its wrong to put humans into bondage!
Barry Cooper says
Would the world be better now if Lincoln had let the South secede, slavery continue, and the two nations develop alongside one another?
That is the only plausible reading of that post, but I want you to confirm that in your view Lincoln was wrong to wage war with the South.
LuzMaria Rodriguez says
ONLY in your sick imagination. One might bet you went to the same doc school as Jill. Your logic and history is unworthy.
Semaphore says
Normally I avoid snarky threads like this, but I must make a few facts clear. First of all, the secession was not about slavery. If you disagree, google “Corwin Amendment,” a constitutional ammendment that would have guarantee the rights of slave owners, passed by both houses of Congress and signed into law by President Buchanan, never ratified by the states due to the secession. What drove the South were heavy tarrifs on exports, particularly natural resources. The agrarian South found lucrative markets for its cotton, tea, and tobacco in Europe, and tarrifs seriously effected their profits, while the North had no such issues. Further, the federal government was in effect no more than an agreement between the states to be governed thus. The South was within its rights to leave the Union. Its fatal mistake was to fire on Fort Sumter, which turned the conflict from a political one to a military one, Considering that Delaware remained in the Union throughout the war (while allowing slave ownership) further weakens the arguement that the North took the moral high ground. Now go ahead and downvote me.
Jeff Bargholz says
Everything you wrote an easily disproved lie and also insane, as a five minute web search shows.
Mark Dunn says
I’m confused, does slavery the civil war and all that, have anything to do the article we have all just read?
Brigitte Goldstein says
Nothing whatsoever. The trolls take any opportunity to spout their venom.
FNU says
In 1860, the Democrat Party possessed the nickname “GOP”. The Republican Party was an offshoot of the Whigs; it was created in the early 1850’s by former Whigs who opposed slavery. Your screed is inaccurate at a minimum.
danknight says
Yes. … Lead on mon capitan …
Mark Dunn says
Last Saturday, Cal Berkeley students sat on the fifty yard line, and delayed the USC vs. Cal game for over an hour. Why an hour? Where were the authorities? Not to make light of pure evil, but one wag said, ‘If the students had been protesting USC’s lack of defense, he might not have been so upset.’
Hannah Katz says
Are there no police dogs or fire hoses in Berkeley?
Mark Dunn says
I saw a video, one brave soul walked onto to the field, and tore up the ‘protesters’/law breakers sign. The poor fellow was probably arrested and banned from the stadium for life.
Jeff Bargholz says
Berkely has a football team? Are the plates all cultural studies majors?
Mark Dunn says
That’s what I said, and then my wife said ‘all the football players are probably vegetarians.’
Algorithmic Analyst says
“Consequences are things that come along later.”
Ain’t that the truth. Especially when they come along when you’re old and it’s too late to do anything about it.
LuzMaria Rodriguez says
Little do they understand or even perceive that certain consequences may yet befall them. They do not know what they do not know. It awaits them to be alone at night on a dark night. Fools.
J.J. Sefton says
” 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.”
It’s not that academia has a relationship to political extremism. Academia IS at the heart of political extremism. Well over 90% of the professoriate are every kind of Leftist all the way down the scale to hardcore Maoist, including the deans, presidents, provosts and everyone who does the hiring.
The few professors who are either conservative or non-political are cowed into silence and those whose tenure shields them will either resign of their own accord or else be forced out on some idiotic pretext a la Trump.
Considering that much of our government is composed of their fellow travelers, the odds of any kind of radical solution to eradicate this cancer are slim to none. Ditto the cancer that is our government and bureaucracy.
And even if we could fire people for their political beliefs – even those that are borderline or all-the-way treasonous/seditious – that means that we’ll have to ditch the First Amendment in order to do so. And that means all bets are well and truly off.
SKA says
I was one of the “tenured” conservative professors who was forced out. So much for tenure’s protection if academic freedom.
Jeff Bargholz says
Did you use the “wrong” pronoun for a tranny student or something like that?
LuzMaria Rodriguez says
Once we get a decent Prez and decent AG, it will be time to start taxing their huge endowments. Charge their endowments for the worthless women’s and gender degree student loans. They seldom now produce thinking students. Propaganda is their game.
Jeff Bargholz says
And cut off all government funds.
Cat says
Other tactics could be used as stated below, taxation, end of federal money, information campaigns that shame, other consequences.
These dumb kids are “lemmings.” Their entire social world is tied into reinforcing one another of these hateful beliefs all sugar coated by crying for some fake victim. All police are racists and guilty and if you disagree you’re the racist blah blah blah. . All Jews must be tortured to death because cry for Gaza blah blah blah. Yeah man, what new trendy restaurant are we all eating in tonight? Cool! Its as evil and banal as that.
You know Nazi killers weren’t so different. They flirted with girls had mothers back home, maybe they even followed fashion trends. If they had cell phones we could have seen the tortures they enacted bit by bit.
lisa_norway says
Dear Daniel Greenfield,
Conservatives (and others) have failed on one big issue:
Telling and retelling and retelling the juridical fundament for Israel´s legitimacy.
Telling Israels narrative, instead of just defending Israel. We are then always late, so to speak.
Please – you and others with a microphone stand:
Go through the fall of Germany and the ottomans, Balfour, San Remo, the Mandate (evt. the other Mandat), League of Nations, United Nations art 80 (and everything before and after when needed).
Short and hard and truthful.
It is difficult for us ordinary people to speak about these great issues when people have never heard about it, and think I am crazy or one-sided.
Our adversaries have solid narratives, based on lies, and they tell and retell them again and again.
Why not:
“From the river to the see – jewish homeland, free free”.
For example 🙂
Mo de Profit says
There are some brilliant 5 minute videos on PragerU explaining the problem beautifully.
Jeff Bargholz says
I’ve read plenty of Greenfield’s articles and he’s written plenty about Israel’s narrative and legitimacy.
I agree that Israel should come up with slogans which tout it, both permanent ones and an endless supply of successive ones.
Your slogan is good.
And Israel should insult the Paleosimians at every turn. Insults produce great results.
arnold ahlert says
The premise of this article is flawed. Many of these kids are radicalized long before they set foot on a college campus by Marxist-inspired teachers’ unions, beginning in kindergarten and going right through twelfth grade. If Americans refuse to address the problems there, they’re kidding themselves.
Jeff Bargholz says
Yeah, the radicalization of our youth isn’t cradle to grave but it definitely starts in Kindergarten.
George Mallory says
“Dumb” is a pejorative term related to intelligence. It is education and moral roots that are lacking in many of our youth. Willful blindness is a sin that goes. back to the Garden of Eden when Eve allowed Satan to convince her that God had not said what He clearly said. Our response must be education and reality orientation. Our university communities must rededicate themselves to education and the truth. The toleration and, at times, endorsement of antisemitic tropes must be expunged from the university communities.
SKA says
Better yet – let’s just defund “Hire(d) Education.”
Jeff Bargholz says
I notice not all our youth fall for this radicalization bullshit, only the dumb ones.
RS says
The colleges have become mass propaganda outlets. Who can think their children will really get a sound, stable, honorable reality based education.
Semaphore says
True. Hitler loved the universities, and gleefully purged them of politically incorrect “nonsense”…
Kasandra says
And always remember, these are our future leaders. God save us all.
SPURWING PLOVER says
Most of our Universes have become leftists indoctrination Centers long before U.C. Berkeley and Harvard Yale or UCLA Brainwashing them to be Big Brothers Servants
Taylor says
>>One of the people watching college students cheer Hamas and tear down posters of kidnapped Israeli children
I wonder if the family or friends of the 2800 Americans killed by Muslim terrorists on 9/11 would be amenable to posting an 8 x 12 picture of their loved ones along side the ~240 pictures of the Jewish–and a few non-Jewish- hostages? Let’s see what Muslim and leftist students would do then.
Jeff Bargholz says
They’d do the same thing. Scumbags are what scumbags do.
notebeat says
‘Higher education’ has never been so low. It’s taken a back seat to radical indoctrination. The driving force behind this isn’t ideology, it’s hate! The easiest emotion to use and perpetuate, a favorite of the ‘left’. Often they don’t even know or understand why they are angry, it’s not necessary when all they do is hate. Hate is a disease.
Kynarion Hellenis says
Hurting another in ignorance or with good intention might explain, but never excuse the wrong behavior (unless one is a toddler).
steve says
Excellent article. And very true.
Birder says
Where are the parents of these college students who need to help undue at least some of this brainwash damage? Whatever happened to good family discussions, political or otherwise, around the dinner table?
With the loss of our Judeo Christian country comes secularism. We have several generations unschooled in ANY type of religious activity. They’ve never stepped one foot across the threshold of a church. Parents are unprepared to argue against any of the leftist commie Dems brainwash from college.
As Axl from The Middle would say…..”can we get some parenting done around here?” Haha—-he’s a stitch! (ya gotta laugh a little in this crazy world!)
Jeff Bargholz says
A leftist can’t be deprogrammed. Parents have to monitor the schools their kids attend and catch the kids young to explain the indoctrination they’re being subjected to. Young minds are easy to mold, either for good or evil but once they’ve been turned, they rarely come back. They usually need a traumatic epiphany to do so and they do it on their own, like David Horowitz.
Domenic Pepe says
When a culture, society, nation or many nations go berserk, cross the depravity line, then the only solution is war
and total destruction of the evil.
I think we are there now ….
Islam has been a scourge on humanity for 1400 years.
Enough already.
Una Salus says
Dumb college kids have been able to plead ignorance for a hundred years but not this time. This is a step change from a bunch of hippies with flowers in their hair to a Pol Pot study group.
Robert of Prague says
Daniel, another great piece from your mighty quill. Have lived briefly in S.F. proper in 1983. Had to force myself to not rip off the Che & “Rather Red than dead” tees from the Berkeley morons. Another great piece is “Jewish College Students: Stop Whining and Grow Some!” by Dov Fisher on Spectator. It’s refreshing seeing a Rabbi dealing w/ the leftie Jews in our colleges.
However, talking about Ivy League schools one has to mention that Yale, Princeton & Haaahvard were founded as Christian schools. To their demise contributed not only white radical goyim but also commie & socialist Jews of the Frankfurt School that escaped Adolf & perverted our once great schools. What we see today is a direct result of the regressive woke benighted leftist mind. Let’s hope we won’t see another Kristallnacht soon on both coasts. It always begins w/ dehumanizing certain groups; cancelling, doxxing & killing are the next steps.
Mark Bradley says
Israel doesn’t need anyone permission to kill all of Hamas chicken shit baby killers. Biden needs to shut the hell up.
Jeff Bargholz says
True. America is an enemy of Israel under the Jihad Joe administration, just like it was under Bareback Hasbeen Obama’s. .Alzheimer Joe’s handlers hate Jews and hate Israeli Jews the most.
Dirty Joe doesn’t really know what’s he’s reading, which is why he can’t finish a sentence, but he knows he’s favoring Hamas over Israel. He isn’t completely gone yet, although he soon will be. He knows the things his handlers tell him to read are evil but he doesn’t care because he’s evil himself.
And he is a pussy. He’s never been in a fight his entire life, unless you count the “Corn Pop” fable. And when he isn’t bowing Xi Ping Pong, he’s signing off on his handlers’ instructions to send Iran $100,33,000 bucks or so. And he and his handlers have never stood up to our foreign enemies, only MAGA supporters and concerned parents at school board meetings, because we’re under our Banana Republic’s thumb.
Andrew Blackadder says
From now on I will refer to today’s youth as the Useful Idiot Generation, UIG, as they seem to be ignorant of what will happen to all those wee Queers and Soy Boys as well as ”feminists” once savages like Hamas and other radical moronic muslims take more power over them as these savages all worship Hitler and yet the wee snowflakes in Western universities have no idea of the ideology of islam.
If you ever wondered how Hitler managed to get so many of Germany’s youth to blindly follow him then look no further than the youth of America, and Europe, today.
We have German youth today screaming ..Kill the Jews.. in the streets of Berlin.
We have Australian youth screaming… Gas the Jews in Sydney..
History repeats itself..
By the time they wake up from their woke slumber it will be too late… and it may already be so..
SPURWING PLOVER says
During Vietnam there was many Viet Cong Supporters in American Hanoi Jane was one