Recently, someone has been flying a small plane over Cambridge, Massachusetts to which a banner is attached reading, “Harvard Hates Jews.”
The usual fiends, of course, began wetting themselves. They were not interested, perhaps, in the fact that Harvard president Claudine Gay had just told Congress that she and her university are perfectly fine with people calling for the slaughter of not just Jews but all the Jews. Of Cambridge, which has been described by locals as “six square miles surrounded on all sides by reality,” one can’t expect a great deal more.
Gay has attempted to backtrack, while her fellow congressional witnesses, the presidents of Penn and MIT, have gone their own ways. The president of Penn has resigned, while MIT has stood firm in the pro-genocide camp.
The pro-genocide camp is also leaping to Gay’s defense, with 500 members of the Harvard faculty issuing a letter in support of her. This only underlines something I’ve written about before, which is that what we are facing is not a tendency toward far-left and/or anti-Israel bias in academia. We are facing a regime.
Suffice it to say, this dictatorship of the professoriate is totalitarian, bitterly antisemitic, and maintains itself through institutional corruption and consistently illegal conduct. Moreover, I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that the regime sees its mission as the dismantling if not outright destruction of Western civilization. Even at its most ostensibly moderate, it wants to change that civilization to such an extent that it would be both unrecognizable and highly undesirable to live in.
For the American Jewish community, however, this regime is an existential threat. If not for the professoriate, today’s Axis of Antisemitism would have been impossible. The regime is its heart and engine. As such, it’s clear that it must be smashed if Jewish life in the US is to be preserved.
The question, then, is how to go about smashing it. The obvious answer is simply to hold it accountable. Like all totalitarian regimes, the professoriate only exists because of its impunity, and without it, the regime will collapse.
I think the following measures would be an effective step forward in this struggle. They should not be imposed by law but rather made mandatory for any institution of higher learning that receives public funds.
These measures include:
The launching of an independent investigation into political bias, institutional corruption, and the use of illegal methods on the part of faculty, administrators, and campus organizations at all relevant institutions. The investigators should have the powers of subpoena and indictment.
The enactment of specific codes of conduct regarding corruption, bias, or illegal activity, violation of which will result in dismissal, even for tenured faculty.
The powers of hiring and dismissal should be taken away from faculty and administration and put in the hands of an independent committee.
Any institution that receives public funds must adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism.
All student organizations involved in antisemitic incitement and/or activities should be shut down immediately.
Students involved in antisemitic incitement and/or activities should be immediately expelled.
Faculty and administrators involved in antisemitic incitement and/or activities should be immediately dismissed.
Any student or faculty member who is subject to disciplinary hearings has the right to counsel. If they are denied it, the hearings will end immediately and those who convened them will be dismissed or expelled.
Any student, faculty member, or administrator who is found to be involved in harassment of students or colleagues for political reasons will be dismissed or expelled.
Political activism of any kind must occur off-campus, not on university grounds.
Obviously, the professoriate and its minions will scream bloody murder at such measures, but that is what bullies do when they actually have to face consequences for their actions.
No doubt they will claim their academic freedom and rights to free speech and assembly are being violated. The fact that they have been abusing the rights of others for decades is an irony that will be lost on them.
In any event, they will be perfectly free to do whatever academic work they wish. It is their behavior that is the issue. As for speech and assembly rights, they can exercise them perfectly freely off-campus, just like everybody else.
In any event, it may very well be that some of these measures will have to be amended or moderated. The very campaign to enact them, however, would do much to curtail the malign behavior of the regime and create deterrence against its illegal behavior.
What is imperative is to begin the process, because people are getting hurt. I do not mean only the Jewish students who are being harassed and assaulted. The current regime also wounds and exploits every American taxpayer. The professoriate is at war with its own society even as that society is forced to help pay for it.
At the very least, this is a monstrous injustice that must be immediately rectified.
For those interested in landing a few blows in this struggle, a petition at Change.org is demanding the removal of the presidents of Harvard and MIT. One down, two to go, as they say...
Apparently, some 40 White House interns are demanding an “immediate ceasefire” in order to save the genocidal terrorist group Hamas.
Now, it’s fairly reasonable to assume that every one of these interns is a product of the professoriate regime, so their actions shouldn’t be surprising. In fact, I’m surprised there were only 40 of them. But their mere existence reminds us of something very important about the elite that the regime produces: These people should not be running the world.
That is to say, the regime is not just pumping out future leaders who are indoctrinated with malign ideologies; it is pumping out future leaders who are completely incompetent. These ultra-privileged young people are simply incapable of facing what leaders throughout history have always known: The world is often cruel, intransigent, and wholly indifferent to human desires and concerns. War is the ultimate manifestation of this, so it is no surprise that these interns cannot contend with its brute realities.
Such a world isn’t a pleasant thing to contemplate, and most of us would rather avoid doing so, but leaders don’t have a choice if they want to be effective. Those who have been taught to avoid it anyway in the name of the pretense of rectitude should be kept as far away from the levers of power as possible.
My weekly JNS column was published today. It outlines the toughest possible response to antisemitism in Western countries: Deporting the antisemites. Needless to say, I think it’s now become necessary.
I must sound a discordant note amidst the encomiums to the late television producer Norman Lear. I understand that he is beloved by millions of people old enough to remember All in the Family and, of course, he did change American television quite substantially. But this change was almost entirely to the bad. Put simply, Norman Lear destroyed American comedy for a generation.
The reason is that, after All in the Family became a hit, all television comedy suddenly had to be what the British call a “social document.” That is, it had to make a statement, and that statement had to be deadly serious, which is to say, distinctly unfunny.
The result was a betrayal of comedy itself. Comedy at its best is completely nihilistic, in that it has no purpose whatsoever except to be funny. In my opinion, the funniest show of all time was BBC radio’s The Goon Show, and the reason was that it had no socially redeeming aspects whatsoever. It simply is funny.
Unfortunately, for some two decades after Lear detonated his comedy-killing sitcom, American television ceased to be funny. Thankfully, his legacy faded with the emergence of shows like The Simpsons, which while they still had their cloying moments, at least embraced a level of absurdity that allowed them to escape the horrible trap Lear had set for them. Today, quite a bit of American television seeks to be funny and nothing else, which is, needless to say, something like a recovery.