An Alarming Perversion of Thought

Sometimes, the thing you hate becomes the thing you emulate

Germany 1933: University students participate in a book burning

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The damned effrontery of this Substack article by Anne Applebaum infuriates me.

Out here in the real world, Donald Trump comes in for a good deal of criticism—much of it richly deserved. His behavior regarding the Russo-Ukrainian War, for instance, embodies the makings of a foreign-policy fiasco for the ages. His addiction to tariffs is economically illiterate and, in the case of Canada, purely ridiculous. But on the other hand, merely by enforcing existing immigration law, Trump has ended the border crisis that the Biden Administration created, then allowed to grow worse and worse. And whereas Biden & Co. did absolutely nothing about the explosion of genocidal antisemitism on American university campuses after 10/7/2023, President Trump is taking steps to defend the civil rights of American Jews, who all too often have been targeted for intimidation, harassment, and violence by “anti-Zionist,” i.e. antisemitic, campus activists.

Credit should be given when credit is due—yes, even to Donald Trump.

But there’s an alternate universe in which the travails of Jews on campus are never mentioned, and in which the true victims are some of the worst people in America. That’s the line that Applebaum shoots in her article.

Just to rub it in, she titles her article “First, they came for Columbia”: the university, that is. That line is a play on the famous lament of the German Pastor Martin Niemoller, recounting how he stayed silent while the Nazis rounded up Communists, Socialists, trade unionists, Jews. Abblebaum, impressed by a Harvard Crimson article that lamented the allegedly sad plight of Columbia University, appropriated its title for her own defense of the indefensible.

I doubt that many Jewish faculty members and students at Columbia would be impressed by this attempt at cleverness.

The Crimson op-ed alleges and Applebaum echoes the claim that the fascistic Trump Administration is targeting American higher education because universities are “independent centers of ideas and prominent centers of dissent.” And this, of course, is what authoritarian regimes always do, because universities are the incubators of liberal democratic values and all good things.

But this self-congratulatory, self-serving claim hardly squares with the historical record. To take a prominent example, the faculties and especially the student bodies of German universities were among National Socialism’s most fervent supporters during the Kampfzeit, the period of the Party’s struggle for power. For instance, the notorious book burnings of May 10, 1933, were led by university students. Nor since the Sixties can it be said that American higher education as a whole has championed liberal political values. On the contrary, and especially on the campuses of our most most prominent, supposedly elite, universities, authoritarian and even totalitarian ideologies have come to dominate the discourse.

How could anyone with knowledge of the goings-on at Columbia since 10/7/2023 in good conscience portray that university as a poor, pathetic victim of Trump and his stormtroopers? Applebaum complains that the Trump Administration “arbitrarily” cancelled $400 million in federal grants to Columbia on the “pretext” of its toleration of antisemitism on campus. To her, the outrage is not that Columbia supplied that pretext through the cowardly behavior of university administration and the atrocious behavior of so many members of the faculty. No! The outrage is that the Trump Administration is calling Columbia to account.

Applebaum has not a word to say about the explosion of campus antisemitism all across America in the past year, nor about the Biden Administration’s total failure to defend American Jews whose civil rights have been violated and whose physical safety has been put at risk. Her grand theory of authoritarian and oligarchical conspiracy necessarily renders the Jews invisible. Her charge that Trump & Co. are engaged in a nefarious assault on American higher education depends on that invisibility, and on her false portrayal of the modern university as a bastion of liberalism, free inquiry, and free expression.

In the real world, the converse is the case. Columbia University is today and has been for many years a bastion of authoritarian conformity, groupthink, anti-intellectualism, and illiberal ideology. Columbia is a place where the concept of liberal democracy is openly scorned. Free speech? Inadmissible, as it might lead to thought crime. Free inquiry? Not permitted, as it might lead to conclusions that contradict the dogmas of postmodern progressivism. Due process of law? Problematical, as it might produce outcomes inimical to cosmic justice. Columbia is the very model of a modern American university: a society within society that polices thought and all that flows from thought. That which is approved is permitted to wield arbitrary power; that which offends is ruthlessly stamped out.

This is why “anti-Zionist,” i.e. antisemitic, activists have been allowed to run amok on the Columbia campus. On the pretext that the First Amendment guarantees it, these goons have occupied campus property, denying access to those suspected of being Jewish. They’ve intimidated, harassed and assaulted Jews. They’ve disrupted and vandalized university facilities. They openly call for genocide and and give voice to the most vile antisemitic rhetoric, some of it right out of the Nazi playbook. This is justified by “postcolonial theory.” The Jews of Israel are branded as “settler-colonialists” in illegal occupation of the land, while the the Palestinians are portrayed as saintly, oppressed “brown people,” the pathetic victims of imperialism, racism, etc., etc. Thus is the world’s most ancient prejudice brought up to date.

And though Columbia’s record as an enabler of this genocidal ideology is perhaps the most despicable, it’s no exception to the rule. The Trump Administration has been supplied with countless “pretexts” for its overdue crackdown on America higher education.

I find it impossible to believe that a person of Anne Applebaum’s stature does not realize all this. I can only conclude that there’s something about opposition to Donald Trump that produces her alarming perversion of thought, which is shared by so many other never-Trumpers. Perhaps, at some deep level of the subconscious, it’s the realization that their indictment of Trump is equally serviceable in many of its particulars as an indictment of them, and also of progressivism in the large—which has long since abandoned the liberal democratic principles to which it still pays occasional lip service.