Leftist Campus Embrace Of Hamas Barbarism: “We’re in the ‘suddenly’ phase” of Higher Ed collapse
My appearance on Breibart News Daily: “There’s that saying that collapse happens slowly, then suddenly. We’re in the ‘suddenly’ phase.”
I was a guest on Breitbart News Daily with Mike Slater on October 19, 2023. The full audio of the 23 minute conversation is below.
We touched on a lot of topics, some of them personal to me, but mostly regarding how we got to the point in education that students and faculty are openly embracing the attack by Hamas in which over 1000 Israeli civilians were murdered, tortured, raped, and/or kidnapped, including the statement by a Cornell History professor about feeling “exhilarated.” Should he be fired? The write up at Breitbart News covers my response on that and quotes a lot of the overall conversation.
We also talked about the reaction of liberal Jews to the progressive embrace of Hamas, and the question of why Jews still vote Democrat. The progressive embrace of Hamas has created “a real sense of betrayal” among liberal American Jews, who feel “these are the people we thought were on our side.” That wasn’t covered in the article, but appears starting at 21:25 in the audio.
Here is the audio:
(If player doesn’t load, click here)
Here’s the Breibart News write up, Professor William Jacobson Explains How the Left Took Over Education: ‘We’re in a Collapse Phase’
Cornell Law School professor William Jacobson explained to Breitbart News Daily host Mike Slater how the far-left took over academia to the point where the U.S. has “a very radicalized faculty at almost every college” in the country, adding, “We’re in a collapse phase.”
“There’s that saying that collapse happens slowly, then suddenly. We’re in the ‘suddenly’ phase,” Jacobson told Slater.
“But it happened slowly,” Jacobson continued. “I’ve witnessed it — I graduated college in 1981. I went to Hamilton College in upstate New York,.it was a fairly conservative, traditional college. It’s now indistinguishable from Oberlin College.”
“The radical professors were hired, they had a plan,” Jacobson explained. “They slowly took over the committees and the hiring committees, and they only hired their own, and over 30+ years, you got to a situation where you have a very radicalized faculty at almost every college in the U.S.”
The Cornell professor, who is also a blogger for the website Legal Insurrection, said “the far-left targeted education,” adding that “It’s no coincidence that Obama’s mentor, Bill Ayers, the former Weather Underground terrorist member, went into academia.”
“I look at the people I graduated law school with in 1984, and the most radical students went into academia. The rest of us went and got a real job,” he said. “We woke up 30, 40 years later, and it’s, holy cow, they’re controlling everything.”
“They’ve only hired their own for two generations. That’s how we got here,” Jacobson affirmed. “We got here slowly, but I’d say – certainly in the last decade, but particularly the last four to five years – we’re in a collapse phase, and people are just waking up to that.”
“They all understood that education was where they could have the biggest impact, because they get to shape young minds,” the professor said. “They understood that that was a weakness of society and a place where they could essentially be activists.”
Jacobson also touched upon the topic of academic freedom with regards to Cornell professor Russell Rickford, who recently went on a pro-Hamas tirade, proclaiming that he was “exhilarated” by the terror group’s terrorist attack against Jews in Israel.
“We’ve experienced this from the right, I mean, traditionally it’s been the right who’s been attacked, not people like this guy,” Jacobson said in response to those who are now calling for Rickford to be fired over his remarks.
The professor explained his position:
People want to say, “Well, you can’t allow Nazis to speak on campus.” And nobody wants to defend Nazis, so people say, “Okay,” and then all of the sudden, you say, “I’m against Obamacare,” and they start calling you a Nazi. And then they say you can’t speak because you’re a Nazi. And that’s the problem. When you give the people in power the power to decide who gets to speak, they will figure out a way that you don’t get to speak.
So I think the remedy for this professor who was exhilarated by the Hamas attack, I think the answer is not to fire him, the answer is to educate the entire campus as to why he’s wrong. The answer is to invite Israelis to speak on campus. The answer is to expand cooperation with Israel.
Jacobson went on to say that professor Rickford “is a symptom of a problem,” not necessarily the actual problem.
“I tend to be fairly lenient on these things,” he said. “I certainly understand why people get upset about this sort of stuff, but having been on the receiving end for saying really mainstream conservative things — I’m very hesitant to open that door.”
“But it’s a guy like that who really puts us to the test,” Jacobson said.
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“If ignorance is a disease, Harvard Yard is the Wuhan wet market”
– BillMaher
A lot of people are ignorant—some due to laziness and some due to deception. There’s a lot of is deception. Professor Jacobson noted in a previous article, “…liberal Jews feel betrayed by leftists they thought were there friends.”
Thousands of ignorant people are out protesting who are ignorant of the fact that many of the people they are protesting with actually hate their guts.
Yes Prof. Jacobson it appears to have happened suddenly, but it didn’t. That is if your eyes were open. The disintegration of thinking on college campuses has been happening for a long time. It just took the massively despicable reaction to the massacre of innocent civilians who happen to be Jewish (also some non Jews) to wake up those who adamantly refused to believe that the people who agreed with them, other liberals and progressives, could be heading quickly down the road of darkness and promoting evil. The signs were everywhere but it would take an entire column, even book, to point them all out. Hiding in Plain Sight.
Maher ’78, Olbermann ’79, and Coulter ’84. All Cornell grads. There may be some hope for Maher, but none for Olbermann.
Not really any hope for maher. He says one or two things that are a tad less radical than the far left loons and conservatives begin hoping like Charlie Brown and read into it their hopes that a far left loon might turn.
Odds are more likely than rashida talaib gets a beauty make over that takes her from hideous to just plain ugly.
I agree with you. Over the years I see him quoted saying something insightful, real. I kept thinking that, given this insight, he can’t possibly continue down his “liberal” road. But he does. He somehow avoids the logical conclusion of what he had said.
It’s really hard to admit that your whole life was spent backing the wrong party.
The vile Muslim supremacist and Jew-hating bigot, Tlaib, is ugly within, and, without.
She looks like Ernest Borgnine in drag.
“Harvard gets 60,000 applicants every year, and if Harvard came to its senses and expelled your genocide-loving asses, 59,300 would happily run over their own grandmothers to fill your spot.”
– Iowahawk
“The radical professors were hired, they had a plan. They slowly took over…” Professor Jacobson went on to say that Rickford “is a symptom of a problem, not necessarily the actual problem.”
Yeah, the real problem is that it’s not just the professors and the colleges. It’s the whole country.
Back in the day, an honest news media wold be taking these clowns to task
Correct. Now, the water-carrying, sycophantic, lapdog/trained seal mainstream media plays on the same team as the other Dhimmi-crat sympathizers, collaborators and enablers of/with Muslim supremacists ans terrorists.
That is the problem.
The large majority of the country does not agree with the Harvard-Cornell-Stanford-Berkeley etc Marxist Jihadi.
There are about 200,000 Marxist Jihadi in academia and corporate HR and government. Go at them fairly but extremely hard. Defund them. Replace them with principled Constitution-respecting professionals. The Marxist Jihadis are nonsense people—who would never live or survive in Venezuela or Beijing or Iran or any other Marxist or Jihadi system.
In many ways, they have lost their purpose. In some ways, it looks like they are training the next generation of brown shirts. These are the most privileged people in America, and the most hateful toward most people, and indifferent to the one they claim to care about. It’s performance. They know they will land on their feet among friends. They are the progeny of Obama.
This is true. They are training the next generation of brown shirts. But, as they say, history doesn’t repeat. It rhymes. So the people hunting for Jews and others will be metaphorical brown shirts but will wear a different color (maybe some version of the manifold gay rights flags).
With the liberal Jewish community continuing to vote Dem, there is much less reason to be encouraged.
Much like when communists were trying to infiltrate colleges in the 50s and 60s. Many pols wanted them kept out, but some knew to let them speak. To hear them and challenge them was the way for students to learn. It’s a slow process and many young people were lost to it. But Soviet Communism fell.
Trying? What we are seeing here is a direct result of the infiltration and subversion of academia by Soviet trained fifth columnists.
Their tree may have fallen, but the roots are still in place all over the western world.
Yeah agreed. The entire leftist/progressive ideology at the core is a worldview of oppressor and oppressed. Those categorized, correctly or not, as in the oppressor group are automatically evil. Therefore they ‘deserve’ whatever happens to them. The oppressed are automatically good/virtuous and this whatever actions they take, no matter how extreme, are necessary at worst and to be celebrated at best.
Two generations for Marxists to ruin our country.
Read the Symbionese Liberation Army wiki page.
The SLA formed from people who met during prisoner outreach programs […] student volunteers from University of California, Berkeley, some recruited by grad student and professor Colston Westbrook from his classes in African American linguistics […] He (Remiro) became involved with the Black Cultural Association, a prisoner outreach and education program for inmates at the Vacaville, Ca. psychiatric prison … Remiro became involved at Peking House, a Maoist collective..
Read the Weather Underground’s manifesto-pamphlet Prairie Fire: https://archive.org/details/prairie-fire-1974
Prairie Fire (1974)
Weather Underground
THE PALESTINIAN MOVEMENT
Bin Xie (解滨) is a Chinese dissident.
After Hamas tortured and killed Israelis, MANY Chinese cheered. Now the anti-semitism speech in China reach a new level. I can’t translate many words due to the cruelty”
Twitter – https://tinyurl.com/j8b5f2p7
Rhetoric of this sort is sanction by the CCP’s version of the Comintern.
As horrible as it would be, I’ll say it again; show the raw videos and photos of what the Israelis faced from the Hamas monsters! Hamas and its supporters can claim that Israel is lying about what happened during the “Military” raid by Hamas and that they never did any of the things that they are accused of. Only with the raw video will the stupid college kids and the Hollywood elites see what they are supporting. I’m sorry to have to suggest this terrible thing but it must be done to regain the moral high ground.
They’ll just say it was deep faked. People who don’t want to believe never will.
One could hope for some collapse of this overbuilt overpriced overadministered industry we call college, but despite Prof. Jacobson’s title, I don’t even see that he shows it’s coming here. Where are the large schools closing, woke departments laid off, student loans tightened up by risk-based underwriting (your B in grievance studies isn’t good enough for a loan, but a B- in engineering would be). We did get downsizing at WVU but it didn’t make the place less woke. I think they downsized math!
The system isn’t changing and the money taps continue to flow. Changes are small and those that administration likes the best can usually be protected.
You can hope, but it won’t happen. The universities are government funded. That is what the “student loans” are about. The universities charge people to be indoctrinated and the government “loans” the money to students (with the repayment of said loan in doubt). Couple that with every guidance counselor in the high school pimping college degrees as the only road to a decent life and you have a steady stream of potential students… No need to choose an actual useful course of study, the bottom line is getting the taxpayers’ money into the indoctrination camps, via the duped students. Its an endless loop.
We allowed Islamic infiltration of our universities, spearheaded by our “allies” the Saudis. Our universities become a hotbed of Islamophilia. Totally, totally shocking.
Our local and federal governments have also been infiltrated. Just look at the scores of Jew-hating Muslim supremacists and terrorist sympathizers who are brazenly and openly spewing their Jew-hate and anti-Israel venom and slanders on social media and on mainstream media platforms, emboldened by their assumptions that they’ll face no consequences for their bigoted bile.
As well as DoD/Pentagon, and, our intelligence agencies.
But also, the ideology is a destructive one, not what is practiced within Islam. Say what you want, Islam encourages family formation, sometimes very large families. But what they push on us is the opposite. You have about 20 different options for gender and sexuality, and you’re constantly pushed and prodded away from the one that leads to a heterosexual family and children.
It’s an ideology of conquest, being imposed on us by the universities they fund.
“Islam encourages family formation”
Nay. Every man that takes four wives leaves three men out in the cold.
A large component of Jihadism is young frustrated men who cannot find a wife because older men that have had time to accumulate wealth can buy their second, third, or fourth wife, taking away opportunities for young men to find a wife.
Erronius
The vile Leftists’ and Dhimmi-crats’ “long march through the institutions,” over decades, has undeniably been hugely successful, to the point that these reprobates now control almost every facet of American society and have propagated their moral and cultural rot throughout all of those facets, while indoctrinating younger generations and turning them into brainless, narcissistic and callous lemming brownshirts who dutifully march to the Party’s drumbeat and who lazily parrot/regurgitate its propaganda.
The pervasive and gleeful support for Hamas and other genocidal and sadistic Muslim supremacists and terrorists that we’ve witnessed, recently, is merely the latest manifestation of this evil phenomenon.
The Left also took over Democrat party apparatus from the local club and county committee level on up. A key piece in college towns were legal changes that lowered voting ages and enabled students to vote from their college residences. This is one reason the Left is so opposed to conservative participation in local Republican politics. And school board politics.
The “crazies” like Maxine Waters are important. They attract opposition outrage, and allow their comrades–with whom they agree on many beliefs and policies–-look normal while the keep plugging away at the “total transformation.
I am not sure when academia became so corrupted, but I think it started sooner than you allude to. The reason Buckley founded National Review in the ’50s is precisely because he was upset with the so called “liberal” worldview dominating the academics he encountered during his time at Yale. He could see even then it was becoming a problem and he wanted to stop it (“stand athwart history…”) and inform others it was happening.
In addition, I suspect few people know about the Reece Committee probably because it was overshadowed by the McCarthyism hearings that happened at the same time. Its purpose was to determine if large charitable foundations (the five biggies at the time were Rockefeller, Guggenheim, Ford, Getty, and Carnegie) were using their influence to push communist ideology in government schools. The chief investigator, Norman Dodd, got his hands on board meeting minutes of some of the foundations and found they had a goal going back to the early ’30s Depression era of trying to change the national identity, or national psyche, of Americans away from one centered on “rugged individualism” toward a more communitarian spirit. The foundations had determined the way to change the mindset (i.e., indoctrinate) a nation of people was through the school system. Then the foundations created model curricula they hoped would help them achieve their goal and pushed it to influential school boards. Most voluntarily adopted it and it quickly spread. (More recently, the same tactic was used to push the New York Times 1619 Project to government schools.)
Norman Dodd gave an interesting interview about his Reece Committee investigations shortly before he died. It’s on Youtube here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4fkabaBl84
My liberal HS English IV educator spent two weeks dissecting Orwell’s “Animal Farm” with us, using it as an allegory to warn us of the ills of centralized power.
1981 was a long time ago.
You know, I’m at the point where I think that the world is too sick with Jew-hatred for we Jews or the world to be saved.
Maybe Israel should go to the Samson Option, obliterate this sad excuse for civilization, and let us start over.
I feel this has happened before. Jude tells us so.
As the world seeks to complete / maintain the theft of Creation from the Creator, it’s to be expected that worldly people will turn beast-like … after all, Jude says that those without the indwelling Spirit of God are like the animals. Ultimately, everywhere there is the light and life of the divine, or the hope thereof (the chosen), the world will seek to snuff it out. In a word, what I feel, is encroaching darkness. Thank God for the Light He has set within me.
It seems the world is forcing it on Israel, giving Israel no choice.
I remember reading years ago a politically moderate professor lamenting that decades ago they would hire communist-sympathizing faculty because they wanted a full range of viewpoints available to students … but that soon they reached critical mass, took over hiring committees and would only hire like-minded faculty resulting in complete leftist takeover of his university.
It’s a Hemingway quote. I’m not nearly the smartest man here but I do recognize the quote.
A reporter asked Hemingway how he went bankrupt, here was his reply:
“Gradually and then suddenly.”
Erronius
Here’s another thing that’s a real problem that’s not covered in this article, but I agree with everything that was said here. Harvard, just for one example, and you can look this up, over the course of a 13 year period, took 1.3 Billion $ in Chinese money, and that’s not counting what they got from the U.S., as well as the massive amount that they charge for tuition for their students every year.
Read that again…1.3 Billion in Chinese Money. They are not the only Ivy league College that took large amounts of Chinese money, either, there were a lot of them, and they got marching orders from them about their hiring practices, and of course the people up top cut to take some of that $ right off the top.
This is also one of the reasons these so called ‘professors’ are in place, teaching false history, woke programming to these students, and we now have ‘law students’ coming out of these colleges that actually hate the U.S. Constitution they were actually intended to be taught to support and defend.
I’ve wondered for years why minorities and Jews vote democrat.Is this what is called the stockholm syndrome ? Mass delusion.
Get organized. There are about 200,000 Marxist Jihadi in academia and corporate HR and government. Go at them fairly but extremely hard. Defund them. Replace them with principled Constitution-respecting professionals. The Marxist Jihadis are nonsense people—who would never live or survive in Venezuela or Beijing or Iran or any other Marxist or Jihadi system.
When the hippies, beaten by Daley’s cops in Chicago in 1968 came back to UM in Ann Arbor, my wife went to the (SDS) meeting. They know they’ll never beat ‘The System’, she said. So what are they going to do? I asked. ‘They’re going into Early Childhood Education’, she told me. Now do you get it???
Even NYC mayor Eric Adams (D) called our college campuses “breeding grounds of hate.”
No, Professor, fire his a$$ promptly and publicly. And do it to the next anti-Semite academician. And the next. Until the message gets across.