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Fight Campus Antisemitism by Fighting Anti-Western Indoctrination

Fight Campus Antisemitism by Fighting Anti-Western Indoctrination

“The level of anti-Western propaganda in a given institution directly correlates with its anti-Semitic atmosphere.”

Benjamin Franklin’s advice on how to mitigate fire risk in Philadelphia in the 1730s is especially meaningful now, in the wake of the tragic Los Angeles fires this January:  “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

Mental viruses such as anti-Semitism or anti-Americanism are a lot like wildfires. Disarming the root cause of anti-Semitism on our campuses today could limit and prevent its future spread. Treating the symptoms, by exposing and condemning occurrences, is essential, but it is a Sisyphean task—an uphill battle amid the rapid proliferation of well-funded and organized anti-Jewish activism.

Anti-Semitism has existed since time immemorial as a uniquely pathological form of racism. Historically, it comes from multiple directions and various political persuasions. Campus anti-Semitism today, however, stems from anti-Western indoctrination related to Soviet propaganda and the Marxist takeover of academia. Paradoxically, days before the Fall of the Berlin Wall, The New York Times published an article by Felicity Barringer titled: “The Mainstreaming of Marxism in U.S. Colleges” (October 25, 1989).

By 1989, Marxism, featuring envy and hatred of Western civilization, Judeo-Christian values, and the success generated by free market economies, had become the primary ideology in American and Western European universities. This tendency reached an extreme form over the past 15 years, as reflected in recent government and corporate policies.

The level of anti-Western propaganda in a given institution directly correlates with its anti-Semitic atmosphere.

Former centers of academic distinction have now lost their intellectual diversity, promoting ubiquitous Marxist platitudes about ever-changing categories of victims and oppressors; they are unable to decisively condemn and combat anti-Semitism. On the other hand, liberal arts colleges promoting traditional values provide students with a peaceful and mutually respectful learning environment. In a recent essay, the publisher of Mosaic magazine Eric Cohen eloquently summarized this contrast:

The rival images emerging from universities across our land reveal a great struggle for the American soul. It is a tale of two cultures, with Jews and Israel at the center of the story. At Columbia, a mob of students, faculty, and professional activists camp out for days calling for the annihilation of Israel…. At the University of Florida, meanwhile, Jews gather together in strength, filling an entire university arena for a Passover seder…. The Jews represent everything the enemies of American civilization seek to destroy…. As go the Jews, so goes the West. The radical activists and their academic apologists understand this deep civilizational truth—and so must we.

Over the past couple of decades, anti-Western indoctrination has become the dominant narrative in public schools, mainstream media, universities, government institutions, entertainment and sports industries, and even private corporations. Anti-Western ideology capitalizes on envy and demonizes prosperous and humane societies such as America or Israel as the worst offenders in human history. Once hallowed grounds of scholastic brilliance and unfettered debate, our universities today produce social activists, who despise their country, civilization, and even themselves. Many graduate with a crippling debt and useless pseudo-knowledge while remaining ignorant of humanity’s greatest traditions and unable to think outside the box.

Why should taxpayers support a poor-quality education system with a self-sabotaging anti-Western agenda that erodes American society? How can we effectively disarm campus anti-Semitism? How do we continue to honor freedom without precipitating the suicide of Western civilization?

The solution is simple but not easy: defund the self-destructive ideology that fuels the protests. Allow free expression but refuse to sponsor departments and other units, programs, or projects that enable anti-Semitic attitudes and activities, including but not limited to protests, occupations, and events promoting terrorist organizations; BDS activities; any slogans calling for the extermination of Israel and the Jews; and similar expressions of hate. The proponents of such ideas may espouse them privately if they so desire, but this does not mean that taxpayers should foot the bill. Allowing free speech and debate is fundamentally different from funding detrimental ideologies.

On the federal level, we could start by changing the criteria for university grants. Over $40B is spent annually in federal grants to post-secondary institutions. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, this figure was slightly over $2B in 1970, despite Cold War pressures. Federal grants should benefit research and instruction with proven merits that contribute to American prosperity, not facilitate anti-American indoctrination. Future grant agreements need to ensure that all funds would solely support the specific purposes of the awarded research and teaching projects.

In the STEM fields, grants should exclude indirect costs used for administrative and other general purposes, such as Facilities & Administrative (F&A) expenses. These expenses comprise a significant percentage of the grant amount. At Harvard, for instance, F&A include funds for departmental administration; general administration; library costs; building utility and maintenance costs, which can go up to 89% in some categories. Current Columbia F&A rates can go up to 64.5%. Taxpayers should not support these expenses, which effectively subsidize feckless administrations and their pernicious policies.

Furthermore, in heavily politicized STEM fields, such as climate studies, we need a five-year moratorium on grants in order to clarify funding criteria. Such grants currently reward political advocacy at the expense of genuine scientific research and dialog. Eminent scientists (including Nobel laureates or experts at MIT or NASA) who disagree with climate alarmism are being silenced and defunded. Grants ought to sponsor practical solutions that benefit human flourishing in a healthy environment, not unscientific activism whose real purpose is to subvert free market economies and national sovereignties. It is no coincidence that Greta Thunberg and her followers are outspoken anti-Israel activists who hate prosperous Western societies.

Humanities and social sciences today refract the world through the skewed prism of anti-Western propaganda, in the tradition of communist polemicists such as Howard Zinn. In those fields, we also need a five-year moratorium on federal grants. This would allow funding agencies to revise their guidelines in favor of time-honored, liberal arts research and instruction. Classical liberal arts education is invaluable in teaching students how to think and write, partake of ancient wisdom, and understand their innate rights and freedoms as human beings as well as American citizens. In his eye-opening analysis of American education (p. 9), philosophy professor and author Andrew Bernstein quotes Jacob Duché on American erudition in the late 18th century: “The poorest laborer upon the shore of the Delaware thinks himself entitled to deliver his sentiments in matters of religion or politics with as much freedom as the gentleman or scholar…. Such is the prevailing taste for books of every kind, that almost every man is a reader.”

Cicero famously noted that unlimited funding formed the sinews of war: nervi belli—pecunia infinita. Limiting federal grants to proven apolitical research in the STEM fields and refusing to fund self-destructive propaganda will weaken the “sinews” and dampen the motivation of those who spread anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism. It would also reduce government spending and eventually revive true academic freedom and excellence.

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Nora D. Clinton is a Research Scholar at the Legal Insurrection Foundation. She was born and raised in Sofia, Bulgaria. She holds a PhD in Classics and has published extensively on ancient documents on stone. In 2020, she authored the popular memoir Quarantine Reflections Across Two Worlds. Nora is a co-founder of two partner charities dedicated to academic cooperation and American values. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and son. 

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Comments


 
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henrybowman | February 2, 2025 at 10:07 pm

Remember the good old days when American schoolchildren used to take “Civics?” *

Now they all take Anti-Civics. This needs to stop.

* Well, I’m actually even older than that. We learned “history” and “geography,” before they put them in a cocktail shaker and poured “social studies” out of it.


     
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    DSHornet in reply to henrybowman. | February 2, 2025 at 10:21 pm

    Me, too. I look at some of the tripe we see on the MSM and ask if these people remember ninth grade civics, which we had in little ol’ backward Alabama. Then I say, “Never mind. Stupid question.”
    .


 
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rhhardin | February 3, 2025 at 7:33 am

Antisemitism is legal, intimidation is not.

Better arguments would be a solution, instead of who’s more oppressed.

Well said, Nora!


 
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spappas | February 3, 2025 at 9:38 am

How about fight anti-Semitism and racism at universities by cutting federal funding? If these schools are terrorizing Jewish students or disregarding the Supreme Court’s affirmative action ruling, they have their federal funding cut. It’s no big deal to hit the pause button on federal funding since the universities have giant endowment funds they can draw down on. And, in any event, after a decade or so of litigation, they can have their funding turned on again or just shut down permanently.

K-12 school choice. Education via government bureaucracy is un-American.


 
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Dean Robinson | February 3, 2025 at 1:55 pm

Well done! Nicely illustrates the “intersectionality” of anti-Americanism, since they all overlap. Their MO is to hook the gullible with one issue, then ensnare them with many.
Best case scenario will be an outcome similar to what happened with academia and Soviet/Maoist Marxism in the 1950s. It became unfashionable even at the elite universities for a while because our survival was at stake. Sooner or later those currently seduced are going to come to with nothing to show for all that sound and fury, and will want to sheepishly move along.

We also need to fight the right wing anti-Semites (i.e. Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens).

In 1999 there was no such thing as a Democrat open borders activist, I can’t think of a single Democrat who was pro-transgenderism in 1999 either.

Ignoring a cancer because it is in the same party as you allows it to grow till it is the entire party.


     
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    ConradCA in reply to Danny. | February 4, 2025 at 3:55 pm

    So why do you think Tucker Carlson is an antisemite?

    I want Trump to demolish Iran bomb Hamas back into the Stone Age until they surrender and turn over the evil people who committed the war crime on 10/7 to face trial.

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