Xi’s Invitation to American Students Comes with Dangerous Strings Attached

By Christopher Nye

Sunday, October 18, 2026

 

At his White House welcoming ceremony last month, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced that China would invite 100,000 young Americans to study there over the course of five years. Daniel Di Martino of the Manhattan Institute wrote on X that the program is “clearly intended to indoctrinate young Americans in China,” and a column in The Hill warned of hostage-taking and stolen lab research. These worries are reasonable but may never materialize. As for indoctrination, many Americans who have lived in China come home more critical of Beijing than when they left; Matt Pottinger reported from China for seven years before helping shape the first Trump administration’s China policy.

 

Our concern should be the data these students will unwittingly hand over through their phones. Beijing will likely keep it for years and use it as it pleases. In practice, nearly every student will need WeChat, which New York University Shanghai’s IT guide calls “an essential communication and payment platform in China.” Some programs require it outright: A Tsinghua summer program tells students to install the app and join its WeChat group before arrival because “almost all course materials and information” go out through it. WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, and Gmail are blocked in China, and few people carry cash, so students use WeChat for cabs, meals, and class chats.

 

In 2024, after reverse-engineering the proprietary protocol of Tencent, WeChat’s Chinese owner, the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab confirmed that WeChat lacks end-to-end encryption and that “WeChat’s servers can and do decrypt and read each transmitted message.” A 2023 Citizen Lab study found that activity in WeChat’s mini programs — used for everything from doctor visits to campus paperwork — is automatically logged and sent to Tencent, with no way to opt out.

 

Under Article 28 of China’s Cybersecurity Law, network operators must provide “technical support and assistance” to public and state security organs, and Article 7 of the National Intelligence Law requires every organization to assist state intelligence work and keep it secret. Tencent is bound by both. China’s police, a term covering both public security and state security agencies, need no judge’s warrant to demand data, and companies have no formal way to refuse.

 

In 2019, Gao Zhigang of Taiyuan forwarded a video to a friend in the United States and was jailed, sentenced to ten months for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” Radio Free Asia, which reviewed the case file, reported that documents in the evidence showed China’s internet regulator and the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda department monitoring WeChat chats directly. Gao said he had deleted the video right after sending it and that the police screenshots could not have come from his phone. The chat he deleted still ended up in court as evidence.

 

Tencent’s help center says an account tied to a mainland phone number counts as a Weixin account, the domestic version of WeChat, and is subject to Chinese terms and privacy rules. Students usually buy a real-name-registered Chinese SIM card in their first week, and NYU Shanghai tells those who buy one through the university to “register for both WeChat and Alipay on-site before leaving,” which puts them on Weixin from day one.

 

Anything beyond monitored chat, starting with payments, requires uploading a passport and scanning one’s face. So does buying the SIM card, under a December 2019 rule, and at most of China’s top universities students scan their faces again at campus gates, dorms, and libraries.

 

The Citizen Lab has found that accounts first registered with a mainland number stay under China’s censorship rules even after switching to a foreign number, so a U.S. number back home does little. Most students keep WeChat anyway, since it is often their only link to friends and host families in China.

 

The State Department’s China travel advisory tells Americans using Chinese apps to assume China’s security services can read their messages “even when you are in another country, including the United States.” It adds that China “has detained people even when they sent these messages outside of China.”

 

Young Americans willing to learn Chinese and live in China are the ones most likely, a decade from now, to work on China at the State Department, in intelligence and the military, on Capitol Hill, and in newsrooms. By the time they are 20, Beijing could have a file on each of them — a passport-verified identity, a face, the people they met, where they went, what they bought, and what they said in private. As long as they use WeChat, even once they’re back in the U.S., the file keeps growing. That standing access is the most dangerous part, since how Beijing might use it later is hard to predict.

 

In 2004, Glenn Duffie Shriver, a Michigan student who had studied in Shanghai, answered an ad for papers on U.S.–China relations. Chinese intelligence officers cultivated him, paid him more than $70,000, and steered him to apply to the State Department and the CIA. When he was found out, he got four years in prison, and the FBI turned his case into a cautionary film for students abroad. Finding and developing a Shriver once took time, ads, and dinners; through WeChat, the Ministry of State Security can now size up these students and spot the next one with little effort.

 

In the 2018–19 academic year, 11,639 American students earned credit in China; in 2023–24, only 1,749 did. Those still willing to go deserve protection, as do the Chinese classmates on the other end of their chats, who face greater danger. Guarding against Beijing should not mean treating Chinese Americans or Chinese students here as suspects. The Justice Department’s China Initiative against espionage and technology theft, launched in 2018, ended up targeting scholars of Chinese descent and was shut down in 2022.

 

A spare phone protects only what is on a student’s regular one, since the WeChat account and contacts live on Tencent’s servers. Deleting the account at home retrieves no uploaded records or face data and cuts the student off from friends in China. Students can do little else on their own; the rest falls to Washington.

 

The simplest step is for the State Department to tell families the truth by moving its warning about Chinese apps off a little-read web page and into every exchange program’s pre-departure material. A parents’ group counts about 80 universities and more than 20 K-12 schools in Beijing-funded programs, and every family involved should see that warning before a student leaves.

 

Reining in WeChat at home will be harder but is necessary. Trump’s August 2020 ban on the app was blocked by a federal judge on free-speech grounds after users sued, and Biden later revoked it. Congress has since supplied a sturdier tool: the 2024 law aimed at TikTok. The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, unanimously upheld by the Supreme Court in January 2025, lets the president designate foreign-adversary-controlled apps with more than a million monthly U.S. users by determining that they pose a significant threat to national security. Trump should make that determination for WeChat and force Tencent to sell its U.S. business or leave the American market. Either outcome would limit Beijing’s free hand with Americans’ data.

 

At the White House, Xi said the hope of U.S.–China relations lies with the people and its future with the young. Beijing takes that line seriously — seriously enough that the United States had to stop recruiting exchange participants in China after Chinese authorities harassed, threatened, and in some cases arrested them. As up to 100,000 young Americans arrive over the next five years, Beijing will presumably take what is on their phones just as seriously. Washington should act before the first of them board their flights.

October 7 Revived Ancient Hatred, in the Middle East and on U.S. College Campuses

By Leonard Saxe

Wednesday, October 07, 2026

 

Three years ago, early in the morning on October 7, 2023, I spoke with a close friend in Israel who told me that his daughter and son-in-law, Deborah and Shlomi Mathias, had been murdered in their home at Kibbutz Holit. Deborah and Shlomi were peace-loving musicians who helped to found a bilingual Jewish-Arab school where they also taught. They were the parents of a teenager and two young adults. Their 16-year-old son, at home with Deborah and Shlomi during the assault, survived only because his mother shielded him with her body. His older sisters lived elsewhere on the kibbutz and were able to hide from the Hamas terrorists.

 

By profession, I am a social psychologist. I try to understand complex human behavior and develop research to address social problems. What happened on October 7 and in its wake is horrific. My heart breaks for the Israeli and Palestinian lives cut short and the families left to grieve for them. My head is puzzled by the resurgence of antisemitism and the hatred that has erupted in the shadow of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza.   

 

The expressions of antisemitism that have become so prevalent are often framed as part of a critique of Israel. But for many of us who study anti-Jewish attitudes, it appears to be a new variant of the historical hatred and persecution of Jews. While criticism of Israel is not necessarily antisemitic, justifying Hamas’ violence and calling for the elimination of Israel crosses a line for many—Jews and non-Jews alike. But where is that line exactly, and how extensive was the antisemitic fallout for U.S. Jews and others?

 

Beginning shortly after October 7, my colleagues at Brandeis University and I set out to answer these questions as they related to antisemitism and prejudice in higher education. Campuses were, unfortunately, near-perfect laboratories. Anti-Israel protests broke out on campuses the day after Hamas launched its attack on Israel, and their impact reverberated across schools and other social institutions.

 

Initially, our focus was on studying the war’s impact on Jewish students. The research evolved to include faculty and non-Jewish students. Our goal was to create an evidentiary base that could serve as a resource when trying to design more effective policies and programs to combat antisemitism and other forms of hatred.

 

A fundamental question has been how to identify antisemitic speech and behavior. Formal definitions are informative but often unhelpful. Hostility toward Jews, like other forms of hatred, is expressed in multiple ways that change over time. Antisemitism has been expressed as a religious hatred, as racism, and as a conspiracy about world domination. Context matters.

 

Not surprisingly, antisemitism is seen differently by non-Jews and Jews. A non-Jewish student may not recognize parallels between October 7 and the history of discrimination and violence directed at Jews, while Jewish students’ knowledge of the Holocaust and the persecution of Jews in the Soviet Union and elsewhere may inform many of these students’ reactions. Jewish students are more likely to perceive antisemitism than non-Jews, even though they also recognize that not all critical words or acts represent anti-Jewish hatred.

 

But the broader context is also important. Our most recent student survey suggests that members of other minority groups perceive more hostility to their group than do non-members. Just as Jewish students often feel that their campus environment is hostile to Jews and Israel, non-Jewish students who identify with other groups (Asian, black, Muslim) also feel targeted by prejudice and hostility.

 

Today, larger forces are making antisemitism and other forms of hatred even more difficult to address. The fractious political debate that has disrupted many societal institutions has left young adults particularly affected.

 

That hostility is “in the air” helps to explain some of what has happened on campuses but does not entirely unravel the dynamics underlying hatred expressed either toward Jews or Israel. In many cases, Jews faced hostility even as the violence that began on October 7 was still unfolding. What triggered the immediate turn to anti-Israel protests, sometimes laced with anti-Jewish rhetoric, rather than expressions of empathy?

 

A key question, along with the evidentiary issue, is whether the charges of genocide and expansionism against Israel are driven by antisemitism. As many scholars, historians, lawyers, political scientists, psychologists, and sociologists have argued, the charge that there is a Jewish conspiracy to achieve world domination is one that has been around for hundreds of years.   

 

When my colleagues and I survey young adults, one of the attitudes that separates those who are anti-Israel from those who are not is a belief that Israel does not have a right to exist as a Jewish state. It is difficult to reconcile the acceptance of that view separate from the history of false claims about Jewish power and desire to control other people.  

 

Rekindling age-old hatred of Jews is not just a problem for the Jewish people and Israel. In the modern world, where weapons of war have become more lethal than ever before, hatred-fueled violence risks ever-widening wars and expanded risk not only for Jews, but for all peoples.

 

I fervently hope for peace and the end of bloodshed in conflicts around the world. A step forward on this path would be to cease blaming the victims. Deborah and Shlomi Mathias did not deserve to be killed simply for living in the world’s lone Jewish state. Honoring Deborah and Shlomi also means remembering them for what they tried to do to enable Arabs and Jews to live together. Despite the challenges, the tragedy and failures of October 7 must move us closer to a standpoint of empathy for the suffering of all people.

Howard Zinn and the Failures of the Left

By Jeremy Black

Thursday, September 17, 2026

 

The People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn, by Dave Zirin (Dutton, 320 pp., $33)

 

This biography, an apotheosis of Howard Zinn, begins with the words, “What would Howard say?” Apparently, for each major social or political event, people want to hear “the analysis of an activist-historian.” And that is what we are offered: sage as saint, plus Dave Zirin, sports editor at The Nation, as amanuensis and guardian of the Sacred Flame.

 

There are various ways to write about historians. For example, David Hayton’s portrait of the British historian Lewis Namier (who, rather unlike Zinn, was outside of the establishment), offers possibly the best combination of personal and intellectual biography; it addresses contexts and contingencies, the play of professional connection and the role of patronage. Hence Hayton does a good job of explaining the political reasons why Namier did not get an academic post for so very long.

 

And then there is Zirin. All he can say about Zinn’s academic career is, “Given what we know about the complicity of ‘the Academy’ with the FBI, the Red Scare may have scared away his teaching prospects.” Zirin’s subject is a hero. The author is fired up not only by his perception of the past (he did not meet Zinn until the mid-1990s) but also his urgent concern about the present, directed at “Trump and his cabinet of reality-show contestants, pro-wrestling executives, and fascist-fanfic authors.” These villains, Zirin says, “lock away the works of Zinn not because they loathe the historian but because they fear the history.”

 

In a scene-setting introduction, Zirin uses the tired concept of false consciousness to explain why the Black Lives Matter protests were followed, a few years later, by 77 million voters’ choosing to reelect President Donald Trump. The book’s prospectus promises engagement but not necessarily debate or nuance. In other words, exactly what might be anticipated of a work about Zinn:

 

Think of this book as ‘A People’s History of Howard Zinn’: it’s a story about the small acts and grand struggles of the twentieth century that shaped him and the ways he shaped those struggles as well. A closer look at his life also provides insight into how to tough it out during the worst of times and why we can never let the bastards steal our hope.

 

And so we start, in “a jungle of terrible odors” where Zinn was born, Brooklyn in 1922. The author’s emphasis is on the city’s poverty even though, especially at that time, it was far better to be a Jew born in New York than in Eastern Europe. Having worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and enlisted as a bombardier during World War II, Zinn returns home and becomes part of a radical milieu that, Zirin argues, resisted paranoia: “Because Western powers no longer needed the Red Army to fight the Nazis on the Eastern Front, the USSR was quickly branded an existential, godless enemy.” Tell that to the Poles. Besides, as Zirin has to note, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s perception of domestic radicals was widely shared in America.

 

It is not only Hoover who is criticized but also “anti-communist liberals.” Zinn in 1948 backs the presidential campaign of Henry Wallace, candidate of the Progressive Party, against Harry Truman. He gets a post at Spelman, a historically black women’s college in Atlanta. There, “intersectionality” (avant la lettre) and “Black feminist activism” play out, with Zinn as an active participant opposed to the “paternalism” that does not accept his views. He is dismissed in 1963. In 1964, he joins Boston University. Old academic quarrels rarely retain their relevance or interest, but Zinn’s clash with Boston University’s president and later chancellor, John Silber — a conservative Democrat critical of many left-wing nostrums — provides Zirin with an opportunity to employ his subtlety to go after Donald Trump. He writes, of Silber: “The ego on display was truly and even impressively ahead of its time. The man was born fifty years too soon. And just as with a certain modern, far more powerful, far less well-read individual, the students knew how to hit him where it hurt.”

 

The book makes much of Zinn’s involvement in the “Black Freedom Struggle,” with an emphasis on his support for “modes of leadership that didn’t come from the top down, but from the bottom up.” The rest of the 1960s find Zinn occupied with civil rights and the movement against the Vietnam War. Zirin sees “anti-liberalism” as the common theme that linked the supporters of the war with those who opposed civil rights: a somewhat warped presentation. That leads him to a hilarious question: “Why wasn’t the entire country in the streets?” He also continuously snipes at others who might share Zinn’s limelight: RAND Corporation whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, for example, is “a smooth talker” who enjoys fame and is always willing “to go to the press with bravado.” Alan Dershowitz is “the future publicity-addicted defense attorney, now disgraced for his association with notorious child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.” Judgment is absent and histrionic language is spread thick. Meanwhile, Zinn’s intellectual influence is exaggerated.

 

Given the great noise that Zinn made relative to his little insight and nuance, it might be asked why one should bother with a new biography of the man. The fact is that Zinn would make a worthwhile topic for a good book: one primarily about the misleading character of so much historical “analysis” (e.g., as Zirin mentions, “When Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, Zinn attempted to theorise the traumatic event by speaking about it in the context of President Johnson’s war agenda”), the divisions and failures of the left, and the successes of capitalism — not least in the sales of Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Zirin is incapable of such analysis and does not appear to understand the questions.

 

The biographer’s focus is the notion of “this land’s five-hundred-year ongoing fight between progress and reaction.” So much for other historical themes. So much for urbanization, economic growth, and religion: the latter conspicuous for its neglect by both Zinn and Zirin, and a subject handled far better by Philip Jenkins in A History of the United States. Indeed, in terms of works that are far better than Zinn’s, Walter A. McDougall’s Freedom Just Around the Corner and Throes of Democracy, complemented by his Promised Land, Crusader State, deserve close attention.

 

Zinn was, of course, a polemical political scientist rather than a historian; a master at leaving out of his scholarship what did not really suit his purposes. He was no Fernand Braudel in his scope and interests but a shouter, one without particular insight or originality. Read A People’s History, if you must, but do not bother with Zirin. He does not illuminate his subject’s problems and deficiencies. He magnifies them many times over.

The Mob Never Learns

By Justin Dillon & KC Johnson

Wednesday, September 30, 2026

 

The mob has now come for Cornell. And this time, it even has a superhero.

 

Last week, a female Cornell student claiming to have been gang-raped by members of the Chi Phi fraternity almost two years ago sued Cornell, Chi Phi, various Cornell administrators, and — by name — the seven Cornell students who were allegedly involved in the rape. The case quickly went viral, and the reactions have broken down along predictably partisan lines — with everyone from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Hollywood actress Florence Pugh (who plays the Black Widow–esque Yelena Belova in the Marvel Universe) weighing in, and most people immediately assuming guilt.

 

The lawsuit was filed by a plaintiffs’ firm that has previously sued Harvey Weinstein and Sean “Diddy” Combs.  There is much in it that should raise some eyebrows — but not necessarily for the reasons the plaintiff wants.

 

Here’s what we know: In 2024, almost three weeks after the incident, Jane Doe filed a report with the Cornell University police. According to the local district attorney, who would later decline to file charges in the case, what she said then is not what she’s saying now:

 

Jane Doe’s sworn statement in November of 2024 did not allege that she was drugged against her will or gang raped. On the contrary, Jane Doe’s statement described her participation in drug use and sexual conduct as voluntary, conscious, and consensual. My office obviously did not and could not have based our November 2024 decision on the allegations in a civil lawsuit that would not be filed until nearly two years later. Furthermore, I have never been contacted by Jane Doe’s attorneys. Not to inform me the original statement was inaccurate and not to ask me to reconsider our decision. Rather, I reached out to Jane Doe’s attorneys after the lawsuit was filed to understand the discrepancy between the original statement and the lawsuit’s allegations and the proper path forward in light of the lawsuit’s allegations.

 

District attorneys almost never release statements like this — much less include, as he did, a lengthy excerpt from a statement Jane Doe gave his office two years ago.

 

It’s unclear whether Cornell had access to the DA’s legal analysis that the conduct, as alleged, did not constitute sex without consent when the university went forward with its own Title IX investigation. (While a Title IX process uses a lower standard of proof than does a criminal trial, the underlying factual question — did Doe’s allegation, if true, constitute a sexual assault — was the same in both matters.) Subsequent statements from both Doe’s attorney and Cornell indicated that the university’s investigation found all seven of the male students responsible for at least some form of misconduct. Two of them were expelled, and the other five appear to have received suspensions or some other form of punishment.

 

We don’t know why Cornell expelled only two of the students, because no one has (yet) leaked the investigation report in the case. Doe’s lawyers could have included the report as an exhibit to their complaint but chose not to do so. They also failed to mention texts showing that the accuser told one of the young men just two days after the incident that “non(e) of the sexual stuff was illegal.” And we also don’t know if Cornell was aware of those texts, which most reasonable people would consider highly exculpatory.

 

We do know, however, that Cornell is almost the last school in the country that would bend over backwards to help a male respondent beat a Title IX charge: It is in the top five of universities nationwide that have faced lawsuits by male respondents who claim their cases were handled unfairly. There is simply no reason to believe that in a case involving allegations of a gang rape by fraternity members, Cornell suddenly decided to favor respondents.

 

Yet the plaintiff has sued Cornell and the seven accused students, almost two years after the fact. Why the wait? The answer is almost certainly the vulgar screenshotted text that was pasted into the complaint, which the New York Post reported was leaked much later by someone in the group chat. That text doesn’t shed light either way on whether or not the plaintiff consented or whether she was too drunk to consent. But it does indicate — as the DA later noted — that “the behavior of certain Chi Phi fraternity members was without question disgusting and morally reprehensible.” Her skilled attorneys clearly understood its PR value — and they were right.

 

For years, accusers’-rights lawyers have been trying to convince courts to make a positively dystopian legal ruling: that refusing to find a respondent guilty and expel him can — standing alone — violate Title IX. So far, they have failed — in the Sixth Circuit against Michigan State, in a district court decision involving the University of Nebraska that the Eighth Circuit declined to immediately review, and most recently in the Seventh Circuit against the University of Wisconsin.

 

That may be why the plaintiff here filed not in federal court — which has been uniformly hostile to some of the claims she brings here — but in state court. (And oddly, in Manhattan — even though Cornell is located in Ithaca, N.Y., more than 200 miles away.)

 

Other strategic choices she made raise similar questions.

 

For one, the complaint is littered with inflammatory or misleading statements. The plaintiff claims not to know whether the Title IX process against the accused students has been completed — even though, under federal law, Cornell had to tell her that, and one of her lawyers has admitted that the process ended with two expulsions. She insinuates that some of the punished students only had to write a reflection paper, which is almost certainly untrue and likely referred to reflection papers that are submitted as part of a typical sanctioning process. And she took the highly unusual step of identifying the accused students by name, knowing full well that doing so would set a mob upon them.

 

Indeed, the mob responded as expected. The Cornell student newspaper threw any semblance of objectivity to the side and authored a grotesque house editorial that literally began by listing all the male students’ names. The editorial added that “if Cornell follows the law, then we should have access to a public deposition issued from the school.” But the Title IX process doesn’t involve sworn depositions, and in any event federal law requires that campus sexual assault hearings be closed to the public.

 

AOC, meanwhile, traveled to Ithaca to denounce Cornell’s “culture of rape,” shown by an incident in which “seven men drugged and gang-raped a 20-year-old woman.” (The New York City congresswoman did not indicate how she reached this factual conclusion.) She castigated Cornell for only expelling two of the male students, while making “the rest write essays as their form of punishment.” Even Doe’s lawyer hadn’t made such a claim, which Cornell publicly denied. And for good measure, AOC’s rally opened with the student sponsors leading the crowd in a chant for a free “Palestine,” “from the river to the sea.” (Because of course it did.)

 

All of this is happening as Democrats are poised to take over both houses of Congress — and possibly the White House in 2029 — and call for a return to Obama-era Title IX policy, when respondents had few due process rights and bias toward complainants was seen as a feature, not a bug. So voilà, we have an allegation that Cornell somehow swept a gang rape under the rug, even though the facts seem to suggest no such thing.

 

We have seen high-profile college gang-rape allegations before, and we don’t yet know how things will turn out. At one extreme were the Duke lacrosse case from 2006 and the 2014 UVA/Rolling Stone case, both utter hoaxes where no sexual contact of any type occurred. At the other extreme was a 2013 gang rape by several Vanderbilt football players that led to several criminal convictions and the two ringleaders’ receiving long terms in Tennessee prison.

 

At this point, the Cornell incident most resembles an allegation of gang rape against members of the 2016 University of Minnesota team. In that case, the school immediately suspended (and thus publicly identified) ten of the players right before a bowl game. Only later did it become clear that at least some of the players were wrongly accused — even if the general conduct of multiple players having sex with an intoxicated woman in their dorm room was, to borrow from the Cornell DA, “disgusting and morally reprehensible.” The university ultimately paid $500,000 to the female complainant — while arguing that at worst its Title IX policies were biased against all accused students, and not just accused men, to defend a lawsuit filed by the accused football players.

 

The point of due process is to sort the sheep from the goats, so that guilty people can be held responsible and the lives of innocent people will not be ruined. Allegations are not evidence, and mob justice is no more real justice than Florence Pugh is a real superhero.

College Freshmen: If You Care About Justice, Beware the ‘Free Palestine’ Movement

By Marc Sarnoff

Monday, September 14, 2026

 

Members of the Class of 2030: Congratulations on starting a wonderful new chapter. College will inspire you to make the world a better place and give you the skills to do it.

 

But danger lurks on campus. You will be tempted by misguided ideologies that prey on that very yearning to make the world a better place. Indeed, you likely encountered one such narrative even before your first class. Nowadays many college freshmen get exposed to “Free Palestine” slogans from the moment they move into their dorms.

 

In the months ahead, you will hear that Israel is an “apartheid state” that is “occupying” the land of the dispossessed “Palestinian people,” while committing “genocide” in Gaza. Every element of this narrative is false, but it is a familiar and depressingly effective strategy. The Nazis portrayed Jews as alien intruders who didn’t belong in Europe, accusing them of heinous acts such as the medieval “blood libel” that Jews use the blood of murdered children in religious rituals. Germans — at that time, perhaps the most highly educated people on earth — fell for it, and the Holocaust was the result.

 

The two narratives are not merely similar; they are related. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem spent World War II broadcasting Nazi propaganda in Arabic from Berlin. After the war, Arab nationalists continued the fight for Judenrein (to be “free of Jews”). It was the genius of the Soviet-trained propagandist and terrorist Yasser Arafat to repackage this narrative for campus leftists in the West.

 

Most people with an opinion on the subject assume that “Palestinians” are a distinct nation and therefore have a legitimate claim to a state. But is that true? There are perhaps 500 million Arabs living in predominantly Arab states whose borders were carved out of the Ottoman Empire by European colonial powers. The Arabs of Palestine share with their neighbors a common language and ethnicity; they are as culturally distinct from Jordanians and Syrians as Texans are from New Yorkers. A Palestinian nationalist movement was born in the late 19th century, along with scores of other national independence movements — including Zionism — primarily in opposition to Ottoman rule. But not every group that thinks of itself as a nation can have a state. That is why you won’t see campus protests for the 50 million Kurds spread across the Middle East — an actual national group with its own language and ethnicity, but no state.

 

The term “Palestinian” came to have its current meaning only recently. For thousands of years, “Palestine” was a common name for the Holy Land, a region with many ethnicities. Even in the decades before Israel’s creation, Jews who lived in Palestine were identified as “Palestinian” on passports. Look up “Palestine” in an early 20th century edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and you will see a long article that mentions Arabs, Jews, and many others, but not “Palestinians.” Only after World War II and the creation of Israel did Palestinian Jews begin identifying as “Israeli,” while local Arabs appropriated “Palestinian” for themselves to reinforce their claim of primacy in the land.

 

The accusation that Israel is “occupying” Palestinian territory has equally dubious historical roots. Today’s “two-state solution” focuses on the West Bank and Gaza — which were captured from Jordan and Egypt, respectively, in 1967, in one of many wars launched by Arabs explicitly to exterminate Israel. “Occupation” under international law implies that some state has a settled claim to the land in question, but there was never a Palestinian state. Jordan and Egypt have formally relinquished their claims, so the status of Gaza and the West Bank under international law is most accurately described as “disputed” or, if you like, “TBD.”

 

The idea of an Israeli “occupation” has a more sinister origin. The Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in 1964 — before Gaza or the West Bank were even “occupied.” To Arafat, the PLO’s founder, “occupation” meant the existence of any Jewish state in the Middle East. Arafat appropriated the language of decolonization to cast Jews — an indigenous people returning to their native land, refugees fleeing persecution and genocide in Europe — as European colonists whose state must be extinguished. That is the meaning of the phrase, “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

 

You will hear that Israel is an “apartheid state.” Yet 20 percent of Israelis are Palestinian Arabs, living freely in Israel with full civil rights. Israel is a multicultural exception in a region full of apartheid. Surrounding Arab states stripped ancient Jewish communities of civil rights and drove them into exile, but you won’t hear anyone clamoring for their “right of return.” Turkey — a NATO ally — has oppressed its Kurdish minority for decades, but you likely won’t hear about that during your time in college.

 

As for Gaza and the West Bank, the Arabs there have been offered a state of their own multiple times and rejected it each time because their leaders couldn’t accept the existence of a Jewish state anywhere in Palestine. Israel withdrew from Gaza entirely in 2005, but security measures continued because Hamas took over and turned Gaza into a platform for missile terrorism against Israel.

 

The results came on the early morning of October 7, 2023, when thousands of Hamas fighters and young Palestinian men crossed into Israel to murder 1,200 Israelis and take more than 200 hostages. Attacking defenseless kibbutzim and young revelers at a music festival, Hamas then hunted down terrified women, children, and the elderly. They were given no evacuation warnings, no opportunity to surrender, and not the slightest sign of human mercy.

 

On campus, you may hear that anti-Zionism isn’t the same as antisemitism. But in practice, it almost always is, just as it was for Arafat. No sooner had Hamas’s atrocities come to light than scores of university student groups publicly and solely blamed Israel, expressing solidarity with Hamas. The rape and torture of Jewish women was documented, but campus activists denied it and tore down posters recognizing the victims. Prominent Ivy League academics framed the murder of 1,200 Jews as legitimate “resistance.” Yale and Columbia professors defended the attack, dismissing Israeli victims as “settlers.” It didn’t matter that some of those communities were socialist peacenik kibbutzim that predated Israel itself: What made them illegitimate to those professors was not their connection to Israel, but that they were Jewish.

 

None of Free Palestine’s lies is more poisonous than the accusation of “genocide” in Gaza. This depraved calumny is the ancient blood libel updated for today’s leftists. The war that resulted from October 7 has been horrific, but it was Hamas that chose the war. By drawing Israel into densely packed urban areas, refusing to surrender, and often refusing to let civilians escape, Hamas chose the way the war unfolded and bears responsibility for the result, as surely as the Nazis bore responsibility for the devastation of Europe.

 

Perhaps 70,000 Gazans have died — far more than the number of Israelis killed on October 7. That is shocking, until you consider Allied bombing killed 500,000 German civilians in World War II, while the number of American civilians killed on American soil was zero. Much of Gaza lies in ruins, but the same was true of Germany in 1945. Yet only a Nazi would say Germany was the victim of genocide.

 

The ratio of civilian to combatant casualties in Gaza has been about 1.5:1 at most by the most reliable accounts. That is in keeping with urban counterinsurgency operations of this scale and remarkably low considering Hamas’s strategy of fighting from schools, hospitals, and apartment buildings. Why does Hamas use human shields? Because it knows many people will blame Israel.

 

What makes the genocide libel most despicable is the lengths to which Israel has gone to protect Gaza’s civilian population. Israel has issued evacuation warnings before major military operations, even sending text messages to evacuate specific buildings about to be struck. It has given Hamas fighters opportunities to surrender, as required by the Geneva Conventions, which Hamas systematically violates.

 

You will hear that Israel “indiscriminately targets” civilians. This is false. International law provides that Hamas’s placement of military assets in or under civilian infrastructure can strip those sites of their protected status. You will hear that Israel uses “disproportionate force.” Proportionality under international law is not determined by whether opposing sides use equal force; the force used must be proportional to military necessity. Here, that necessity is the disarmament of Hamas and the end of its rule in Gaza.

 

Gaza’s death toll is perhaps 3 percent of its pre-war population and is composed heavily of combatants. Actual genocides look like the Nazis murdering 60 percent of Europe’s Jews, the Khmer Rouge slaughtering 30 percent of Cambodians, or the Turks killing 75 percent of Armenians. Those millions were intentionally murdered, not merely civilian casualties of war.

 

Under international law, genocide is the attempt to destroy a national, ethnic, or religious group. Israel is doing no such thing, and saying otherwise trivializes the real genocides of the past, as well as the genocide Hamas and its terrorist allies have pursued for decades.

 

Hamas leaders boast they would repeat October 7 “a thousand times.” Yet they get a pass on campus because “resistance to occupation” is framed as the noblest cause. By excusing its double war crime — the murder of Israelis and the callous sacrifice of Palestinian civilians — campus protesters unwittingly aid terror. Watching protesters’ routine intimidation of Jewish students, Hamas rightly brags, “We have our own people everywhere.”

 

In June 2026, eight students, alumni, and former employees of the University of Michigan were arrested for targeting university officials and Jewish businesses with intimidation and destruction of property. Once you connect the dots, you may realize that behind the veneer of justice and liberation, the slogans of “Free Palestine” are an incitement to genocide against Israelis and violence against Jews everywhere. And if you believe Israel has a right to exist and defend itself, many activists and sympathizers will not merely disagree with you. They will try to bully, intimidate, and silence you.

 

The campus left prides itself on fighting hate but ignores — and indeed often shares — the all-consuming hatred that Israel’s neighbors have shown the Jewish state since its founding. Campus activists who claim to stand for the rights of women, gays, and other minorities make common cause with Islamists who persecute those same minorities. The world is full of minorities facing persecution on a massive scale without a single banner being raised on their behalf on campus. Around 32,000 pro-democracy protesters were murdered in Iran in just a few days this year, but activists mostly blamed the U.S. and Israel, when they could be bothered to care at all.

 

There is a simple lesson here: Don’t believe something simply because “everyone says” it’s true. The Israel–Palestine conflict will test your ability to distinguish cause and effect, right and wrong, victim and aggressor. A dismaying number of your classmates will fail that test. Don’t be one of them. Read, think, and decide for yourself — and stand up for what you believe.

Have We Turned the Corner on Higher Ed?

By Frederick M. Hess

Thursday, August 20, 2026

 

Conservatives’ trust in higher education has plummeted since 2015, and for good reason. A deluge of canceled speakers, tent encampments, DEI depravity, grade inflation, and out-of-control borrowing has marked the culmination of decades of institutional rot that has turned brand-name campuses into bastions of left-wing ideology.

 

This has made the right’s recent counteroffensive truly remarkable. This spring, the Chronicle of Higher Education published a profile of Harvey C. Mansfield, Harvard University’s iconic conservative professor of government. It observed: “Mansfield spent six decades championing lost causes. At 94, he’s suddenly winning.”

 

Big, if true.

 

Have we turned the corner on higher ed? The signs are certainly auspicious.

 

Take grade inflation, a long-standing preoccupation of Mansfield’s. For the past decade, more than 80 percent of undergraduate grades at Harvard College have been A’s or A minuses. This May, Harvard’s faculty voted to impose a 20 percent cap on A’s awarded in each course. Dean Amanda Claybaugh predicted that the result would “strengthen the academic culture of Harvard” and might “encourage other institutions to confront” the problem of grade inflation with “rigor and courage.”

 

Universities have also started to reckon with the lack of intellectual diversity on campus. In June, Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute issued a heartening faculty report, which conceded that “genuine problems exist related to open inquiry, diversity of perspectives, and free expression” and asserted that colleges need more ideas “associated with political conservatism.”

 

In April, Yale’s Committee on Trust in Higher Education issued a bracing report calling out the academy’s failure to defend free inquiry, support heterodox debate, deliver value for students, and acknowledge the validity of its critics’ charges. The report’s many sensible suggestions included promoting ideological diversity, getting devices out of classrooms, streamlining bureaucracy, and making costs more transparent.

 

There’s been a sea change on DEI, with universities closing or revamping DEI offices in response to public and political pressure. In 2025, the University of Michigan shuttered its largest-in-the-nation DEI operation after a devastating New York Times exposé. Since 2023, more than 30 anti-DEI laws have been adopted by state legislatures. President Trump’s Day One executive order, “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” triggered aggressive federal investigations of campus conduct and froze hundreds of grants and contracts. As of June 2026, the Chronicle of Higher Education’s “Dismantling of DEI” tracker listed changes at 451 campuses.

 

More than 150 universities have adopted a formal policy of institutional neutrality on political matters — a stark reversal from the virtue-signaling wokeism of the early 2020s that produced campus pronouncements decrying everything from police brutality to fossil fuels. Meanwhile, since 2021, nearly two dozen new programs in Western civilization have emerged at universities across the country to champion republican virtue and teach the Great Books with academic rigor. One heartening consequence of all this activity is that, for the first time in decades, a vibrant job market is emerging for conservative historians, humanities scholars, and political scientists.

 

On university admissions, the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023) — which ended race-based affirmative action — and its enforcement by the Trump administration have brought long-overdue change. Meanwhile, selective colleges have begun reinstating the standardized testing requirements that they dropped in the name of “equity” during the height of woke culture. The push to restore testing has drawn support from some surprising quarters. In May, nearly 1,000 University of California faculty members signed a letter arguing that “test-blind” admissions meant that too many new students were unprepared for college math and science.

 

Under threat of federal investigation, university leaders have rapidly restored order to their campuses. Not long ago, America’s most prestigious campuses were thick with pro-Hamas rallies and tent encampments and “anti-colonialist” building occupations. In an article earlier this year, The Atlantic’s Rose Horowitch observed that “universities chose to let campus demonstrations get out of control.” Now, she notes, campus leaders “are choosing to suppress them.”

 

While the Trump administration hasn’t delivered many legislative wins, last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act featured several significant higher ed reforms. A new “do no harm” provision stipulates that, to qualify for federal student loans, college programs must demonstrate that their graduates earn more than similarly situated adults with a high school diploma. It’s a low bar, but a meaningful one: More than half a million students are estimated to be enrolled in programs that would fail the new test. The legislation also imposed much needed limits on graduate school lending. Combined with a bold push to overhaul accreditation — an effort that continues from Trump’s first term — the reforms suggest lasting changes in higher ed financing and accountability.

 

To see the Overton window shifting, one need only scan recent Chronicle of Higher Education headlines such as “We Need an Audit of the Political Enthusiasms of the Last Decade,” “How Humanists Helped Wreck the Humanities,” “The Left-Wing Case for Great Books,” and “Critics Are Doing Colleges a Favor.” For a publication that long dismissed higher ed’s critics as MAGA know-nothings, the tonal change is striking.

 

***

 

All in all, there’s much to suggest that we’ve turned a corner. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It’s not clear that the shifts on campus are as profound or durable as we might wish.

 

A telling illustration came in August, when Secretary of Education Linda McMahon issued a genial “Call to Action” to campus leaders, imploring them to explain themselves to the American people and clarify their commitment to teaching and research. While reasonable enough, the letter marked a head-spinning retreat from the ominous, threatening “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” that the administration issued a year ago. That statutorily unmoored exercise in overreach had gone nowhere, while making the administration look less like a bulwark of academic integrity and more like a playground bully. That cost the administration the high ground and helped its academic foils regain their footing.

 

While colleges have shuttered DEI offices and scrubbed their websites of DEI terminology, it’s unclear whether DEI is dead or merely in hibernation. Many institutions “abolished” DEI by folding it into another campus office. As the conservative outlet the College Fix reports, nearly 100 colleges simply renamed their DEI offices, turning to euphemisms such as “belonging,” “community,” and “inclusive excellence.” Even among colleges that pledged to abandon DEI, it’s unclear whether much has changed. Mark Perry, an emeritus professor at the University of Michigan, found that 84 percent of the staff in its DEI office in 2024–25 remained in their jobs this April — a year after Michigan promised to eliminate much of its DEI apparatus. Meanwhile, there’s much to suggest that campus censoriousness is a consequence of Gen Z’s norms and social media habits, which means top-down reforms may go only so far in changing campus culture.

 

Or take grade inflation. Harvard’s move to put a cap on A’s is welcome, but the policy continues to permit unlimited A minuses, which makes the plan far less potent than many observers may realize. And there’s a cautionary Ivy League tale regarding grading reform: In 2014, a decade after similarly moving to limit A’s, Princeton abandoned the policy. Why? Although an advisory faculty committee found that the policy did not have “any measurable negative impact” on hiring prospects or graduate school admissions, it nonetheless fretted that the policy made students “feel as though they are competing for a limited resource of A grades.” In other words, Princeton abandoned the policy out of excessive concern for its students’ delicate sensibilities. Can we be confident that Harvard’s experiment won’t fizzle out in similar fashion?

 

More fundamentally, Harvard’s policy doesn’t address concerns about students’ minimal effort, lack of preparedness, or light workloads. There is widespread sentiment among professors, including at highly selective institutions, that students can’t (or won’t) read whole books. Students report spending just over six hours a week reading for their classes, and they say that their weekly academic workload doesn’t exceed 20 to 25 hours total. A modest attempt to limit the number of A’s is fine, but it doesn’t address the quiet collusion in which students pretend to learn, faculty pretend to teach, and no one feels hassled.

 

And then there are questions about the staying power of the White House’s higher ed campaign. While the Trump administration’s shock-and-awe tactics drove early wins, its clumsy rhetoric, procedural sloppiness, and disdain for due process have had consequences. Moreover, Trump’s maneuvers have an expiration date of January 2029; the executive orders, administrative actions, and high-pressure negotiations all rest on flimsy statutory footing, easily reversible by a Democratic administration. That reality, combined with Trump’s sinking poll numbers and the prospect of a tough November for the GOP, has led many in higher ed to quietly conclude that they can play possum and wait things out.

 

The Trump administration’s ruthless manipulation of federal grants, programs, and investigations has helped produce significant wins, but it has also set troubling precedents. (It was the Biden administration’s Title IX and civil rights lawlessness, after all, that helped enable Trump’s adventurism.) If a Democrat wins the presidency in 2028, it’s easy to imagine the Day One executive orders that will follow. Western civilization programs will be targeted for creating “hostile learning environments” for minority students. Admissions officials will be encouraged to employ criteria such as personal essays or community income levels as proxies for race to promote “nondiscrimination” in their decisions. Flagship red-state schools will be required to renounce their new curricular directives and anti-DEI policies lest they find their grants and payments held up. College leaders will be pressed on free speech grounds to accommodate protesters. Trump publicly threatened Harvard’s tax-exempt status; under a Democratic president, something similar may well be in store for Hillsdale College.

 

A further problem is that many red-state attempts to counter DEI have been clumsy in design or execution. Partisans are eager to turn Western civilization programs into right-wing campus outposts that are narrowly committed to combating “leftist ideology.” A crackdown on “race and gender ideology” at Texas A&M University led administrators to forbid a philosophy professor from teaching Plato’s Symposium because the text “debates the existence of more than two genders and explores homosexuality.” Such incidents make talk of free inquiry ring hollow. Robert P. George, the founder of Princeton University’s conservative James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions — the model for today’s Western civilization programs — was recently moved to caution, “There’s enough indoctrination going on at universities already. We should eliminate it, not mimic it from the other side.”

 

***

 

So, are we winning? Yes — for the moment. But the wins are tenuous, and some may prove easily reversible. Still, we’re in a far better place than we were just three years ago.

 

The fuller answer, though, is more muddled because a series of sector-wide disruptions are poised to redraw some of the familiar divisions in higher ed. The emergence of AI, the demographic cliff, and populist suspicion of experts are creating critical new fault lines, which in turn are yielding some surprising alliances and requiring an entirely new scorecard for judging winners and losers.

 

First, AI is about to make conversations about grade inflation look quaint. Students have always taken shortcuts, but it’s never been this easy. AI tools will “watch” lectures for them, complete their take-home exams, and craft their essays. No learning required. In response, universities have abandoned century-old honor codes, and faculty have returned to handwritten essays, blue books, and oral exams. Meanwhile, an eager alliance of campus administrators and tech bros argues that AI means “mere” knowledge is obsolete. Alongside corporate lobbyists, they are promoting content-lite “21st-century skills” such as “collaboration” and “communication” rather than supposedly outmoded subjects such as history and literature. In this fight, conservative champions of liberal education and old-school progressive academics often sound alike as they confront a modish coalition of tech enthusiasts, Chamber of Commerce types, and trend-chasing college mandarins.

 

Second, the long-running decline in birth rates has led to falling enrollment, putting hundreds of campuses into dire financial straits. Scores of colleges have closed in the past decade, and hundreds more are likely to do so in the decade ahead. Competition from online alternatives and new limits on lending will only ratchet up that pressure. Small private colleges are especially at risk. Since many of them are faith-based or located in small towns and rural areas, potential closures could be hugely disruptive to their communities. That explains the oddly sympathetic relationship between the higher ed blob on the left and some rural populists and Christian colleges on the right. They are taking on a coalition of budget-conscious conservatives and wonkish Democrats. The financial squeeze could fundamentally reshape the debate over campus funding and accountability.

 

Third, rising skepticism toward science seems poised to fracture both the right and the left. The populist right has cheered Trump’s efforts to cancel billions of dollars in research grants, while the activist left has shown, on matters ranging from gender ideology to climate change, that its support for science is contingent on political utility. Populists are suspicious of research funding and eager to render it more responsive to the direction of politics. These efforts have given rise to a budding coalition of bipartisan policy wonks and researchers seeking to stabilize federal support, protect the grant-making process from ideological and political manipulation, and perhaps finally address long-standing concerns about curbing waste and ensuring rigor.

 

By all means, take heart in the right’s recent victories. They’ve been hard-earned. But they’re also precarious. And they’re about to be overtaken by events that may reshuffle who’s on which side in the battles defining the next era of higher ed.

Elite Formation Is Fueling the Socialist Project

By Raleigh Adams

Monday, September 07, 2026

 

The revolution will not be televised, perhaps, but it will most certainly have a really good résumé.

 

Contemporary American socialism is primarily embodied in the national cultural imagination by the Democratic Socialists of America, and its highly educated quality is often treated as evidence of hypocrisy: These revolutionaries attended such elite institutions as Bowdoin, Yale, Columbia, and so on. But the educational pedigree of the DSA’s leaders may reveal something more consequential. America has produced a large class of educated, ambitious young people whose credentials promise status and influence that the economy often fails to deliver, at least for them. The DSA offers frustrated young elites something enormous to build.

 

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani graduated from Bowdoin, a selective liberal arts college, with a degree in Africana studies in 2014. New York State Senator Jabari Brisport earned his undergraduate degree from New York University (NYU) and his graduate degree in fine arts from Yale. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez attended Boston University for international relations and economics.

 

The academic accolades of the DSA’s members extend to its younger ranks as well. Grace Ryan, infamously known as “Lulu Lenin,” graduated from NYU in 2025 before emerging as a recognizable DSA activist. Gustavo Gordillo, already a New York City DSA co-chair, earned an undergraduate degree and a master’s degree from Yale. A cultivated group of young people is rising through the ranks behind them. The DSA is actively advertising itself as a pipeline to political action for ambitious students by hosting workshops such as “How YDSA Can Run a Zohran on Your Campus.”

 

An obvious explanation for why young elites are flocking to the DSA is that socialism is “simply a game for rich young boys to play.” There is, of course, something inherently comedic about a collection of NYU, Yale, and Bowdoin graduates rallying for the proletariat. The charge of “champagne socialist” practically writes itself, and conservatives have been more than happy to make it. But hypocrisy, however amusing, does not explain the DSA’s political appeal.

 

In fact, these are young people who have been selected by elite institutions. They have been educated to think seriously about politics and society and encouraged to imagine themselves as capable of shaping both. Whether or not the economy has actually failed them, they have been conditioned to expect their lives to carry a certain degree of consequence.

 

In other words, the most interesting question at play is not why people with elite educations become socialists despite their privilege. It is what will happen when a society becomes extraordinarily good at producing educated, politically literate, and ambitious young people — and considerably less certain of what to do with all that ambition.

 

In his work, End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration, the social scientist Peter Turchin offers the metaphor of musical chairs to explain the overproduction of “aspiring elites.” Society has rapidly increased the number of credentialed young people — the players in musical chairs. But the amount of perceived elite positions and jobs — the chairs that can be claimed when the music stops — has not expanded proportionally. Thus, competition for status, prestige, influence, and desirable professional positions has intensified, and frustrated aspirants have become a source of political instability.

 

The signs of elite overproduction are not particularly difficult to spot. America produces an ever-growing number of people with college and graduate degrees, funneling them into brutally competitive fields such as academia, journalism, law, politics, the nonprofit sector, and the arts. But the number of positions offering genuine institutional authority remains relatively small. Many of those professions then concentrate their employees in extraordinarily expensive cities, where even respectable salaries increasingly struggle to deliver the homeownership, family formation, and material stability that they expected professional success to make possible. These people are hardly poor. Today’s graduates of elite universities can be objectively comfortable and nevertheless discover that the life of influence, status, and autonomy they expected is exceedingly difficult to obtain. The strange problem is that America has become very good at educating people to expect status, influence, and consequence while producing far fewer chairs for them to securely occupy.

 

But the musical chairs metaphor can only take us so far. A chair is ultimately a position to occupy, and elites often seek more than that. They want influence, distinction, and the opportunity to leave some mark on the institutions they enter. The problem, then, is not merely what happens when there are too few prestigious jobs for too many qualified people. It is what happens when a society produces an abundance of people who expect to matter but not enough opportunities for them to feel that they do.

 

Nearly two centuries before Turchin gave a sociological account of that problem, a young Abraham Lincoln approached it as an issue of political ambition. In his address before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Lincoln looked upon a generation that had been born just slightly too late. The great acts of the American founding had already been accomplished. Independence had been won, the Constitution written, and the republic established. Lincoln was left facing a generation of Americans who — unlike the Founders before them, who had been fortunate enough to find an object for their ambition in the creation of a republic — were faced with a different temptation: If there is nothing left to build, distinction may be found in tearing down what has been built.

 

Lincoln was under no illusion that the most ambitious of the men before him would be content simply to tend what their fathers had built. “Towering genius disdains a beaten path,” he warned. “It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.” Someone of such ambition sees little glory in “adding story to story upon the monuments of fame erected to the memory of others.” He wants not merely to serve beneath a great man but to become one himself. He “thirsts and burns for distinction,” and he “will have it,” Lincoln warned, whether through “emancipating slaves, or enslaving freemen.”

 

There is, then, a deeper American anthropology behind the DSA’s connection to college campuses. The movement has recognized something real about the young people our institutions produce. They want to exercise influence. They want their education to amount to more than a credential and their lives to be defined by more than professional advancement. Most of all, they want something consequential to do. In light of the Founding, these are deeply American impulses if harnessed and fostered well.

 

Socialism has an obvious advantage in satisfying that desire. It can offer the ambitious young person something that an old order always struggles to provide: the exhilaration of founding something new. The graduate entering finance can hope someday to become a portfolio manager; the young lawyer can hope to make partner; the political staffer can climb the ladder of an established party. These are perfectly respectable ambitions, but they are examples of what Lincoln described as “adding story to story” upon monuments erected by others. Those who pursue them will still recognize that they are standing on the shoulders of giants. The potential socialist is offered a grander project. Capitalism itself can be replaced. Existing institutions can be remade. The young activist need not merely inherit the world; she can participate in creating whatever comes next.

 

This does not mean that every wannabe Zohran Mamdani or Grace Ryan is secretly motivated by such a thirst for glory. Rather, radical movements have an enduring advantage in the competition for ambitious young people: They give them direction, people to organize alongside, responsibilities to take on, and the promise that their work is building toward something. The DSA seems to understand this. Its campus organizations do not merely hand students a reading list and hope that they vote correctly in November. They invite young people into a movement where their work is meant to culminate in something larger.

 

Conservatives should be considerably less amused by the glitzy résumés of socialists.

 

To steer ambitious young Americans away from this path, we cannot simply tell them that their expectations are excessive, that their degrees were foolish, or that they should be grateful to inherit institutions built by “better men.” Nor is it enough to offer a politics almost entirely in the language of preservation: of the Constitution, the family, the free market, Western civilization. Those aims are worthy and important and must remain at the core of conservatism, but preservation alone can be a difficult summons for the young person who is desperate to create.

 

Conservatives need to compete with the socialist left not merely for young people’s votes, but for their ambition. And they must follow Lincoln’s instruction by channeling that ambition toward a worthy object. That means offering a formative vision of political life in which young Americans can become authors rather than merely custodians: Give them institutions in which they can exercise real responsibility; communities they can help govern; and businesses, publications, schools, churches, and associations they can build.

 

The DSA’s rising generation is being told that history remains unfinished and that they can change the institutions around them. Conservatives can laugh at the Ivy League degrees and the revolutionary affectations of these privileged radicals. But when the joke is over, the DSA’s activists will remain ambitious.

 

The question for conservatives is not how to teach an ambitious generation to want less. It is how we can offer them something better to build than the DSA’s destructive and hoped-for creations.

El-Sayed and the Anti-Anti-Discrimination Democrats

By Seth Mandel

Friday, September 04, 2026

 

JNS reports on a forthcoming Cardozo Law Review paper on the developing “anti-Zionist” exception to civil-rights law. The attempts to extend civil-rights protections to Jews on campus have been undercut by a loophole: Some courts have decided that if you just say “Zionist” instead of “Jew”—or even in addition to it—you can discriminate against Jews by claiming you are merely against Jews’ “political” opinions.

 

Jon Michaels of UCLA and Matthew Segal of Tufts will be publishing the paper next year. Their case study is Torres v. Carlson, in which Columbia University employees sued after having been taken hostage in a university building by pro-Hamas activists. The activists allegedly called Torres and Wilson “Jew-lover,” “Jew-worker” and “Zionists.”

 

A federal judge dismissed the suit, JNS notes, “reasoning in part that anti-Zionism could not establish anti-Jewish discrimination, because Jews disagree about Zionism and because anti-Zionist rhetoric constitutes political speech.”

 

The case highlights just how absurd the legal movement to withhold rights from Jews has become: Call someone a “Jew-worker,” and successfully claim you were just being “anti-Zionist.”

 

Even without the “Jew-worker” taunts, this legal blind spot was always silly. It’s usually used to keep Israelis out of various campus clubs and classes. But “Israeli” is a national origin, and civil-rights law prohibits discrimination by “national origin.” Excluding Israelis because you want their country to cease to exist is a clear violation of the statute. You don’t have to convince anyone that the bigot is an anti-Semite because they are already admitting discrimination according to national origin. And if national origin discrimination can be protected by claiming it is political, then that part of the law is a dead letter.

 

Some libertarians might oppose antidiscrimination law on principle, but the campus activists aren’t among them. These bigots want civil-rights law to remain airtight except for Jews. They believe the protections should still apply to all non-Jews.

 

That is where Abdul El-Sayed falls as well on this issue. This week, the House passed a bill, written by Democratic Rep. Josh Gottheimer and Republican Rep. Virginia Foxx, that builds on existing U.S. antidiscrimination law. This bill prohibits federal funding of colleges that discriminate against academic partnerships with Israeli institutions, though it does not penalize speech or expression. It is similar to previous legislation that enforces federal antidiscrimination law among federal contractors.

 

Most Democrats voted against it anyway. El-Sayed (who is running for the Senate, not House) commented on the bill with the following incoherent assembly of words:

 

“Today, rather than focus on the price of gas, the price of groceries, ending the war, or stopping the trade war, Congress spent its time declaring this. ‘Dear colleges that receive American taxpayer money: We will take away that American taxpayer money if you decide to keep it from going to Israel.’ Aside from being blatantly unconstitutional, it’s wild. Why is it wrong to want our taxpayer money spent here to provide for schools here instead of being sent somewhere else?”

 

Because there is no bill in existence that matches El-Sayed’s description, one can safely assume he is not a principled libertarian opponent of antidiscrimination law. He is an opponent of saying things that are true.

 

Of course this bill doesn’t force anyone to send taxpayer money to Israel, as El-Sayed alleges. But it does prohibit the use of federal dollars to discriminate against Jews as part of an anti-Semitic campaign orchestrated by foreign Arab governments. Specifically, much of this precedent is built on decades-old prohibitions against forcing American companies to abide by an Arab League boycott.

 

U.S. laws have been countering this violation of American sovereignty for half a century. One would think El-Sayed and his fellow America Firsters on either side of the aisle would support U.S. companies under attack from authoritarian states. One would be wrong. Because just as with the “anti-Zionism” exception, these politicians and activists believe they have a right to violate the rights of other Americans.

Democrats Take Aim at the Civil Rights Act

By Seth Mandel

Wednesday, August 19, 2026

 

Last year, as the Trump administration continued its investigations into anti-Semitism at elite universities, several civil-rights attorneys at the Department of Justice were temporarily transferred to the agency running the anti-Semitism probe to help with the workload. One of those was Haley Van Erem.

 

The events that followed produced lessons in three problems that have held back the government’s attempts to restore the civil rights of America’s Jewish college students:

 

1. The ideological opposition to combating anti-Semitism among career bureaucrats.

 

2. Those same bureaucrats’ resentment at being told to apply civil-rights law, specifically Title VI, to Jews.

 

3. The Trump administration’s aversion to process norms.

 

Van Erem quit and has now filed a “whistleblower” complaint that appears aimed at derailing the application of civil-rights law to Jews, even as she perfunctorily denounces anti-Semitism.

 

Van Erem contends that the administration began the investigation already believing the colleges violated Jewish students’ civil rights. That’s probably true: by the time Van Erem grudgingly joined the inquiry, civil-rights violations had been happening in full view of the public. These included university employees discriminating against Israeli students on the basis of national origin, mobs physically blocking Jewish students from accessing areas of campus, and the uneven application of university codes of conduct to the detriment of Jews.

 

Van Erem also complains that she was given overly strict deadlines that prevented her from dragging out the process to her satisfaction, and that she was often overruled by her superiors—though her complaint actually paints a picture of her bosses being surprisingly receptive and willing to incorporate the objections of an employee who made clear that she didn’t want to be there. Last, Van Erem describes an administration that would launch investigations without evidence of wrongdoing, but because of the sheer volume of anti-Jewish agitation permitted on these campuses, this particular claim is so ridiculous and self-discrediting as to make one question whether Van Erem is engaging in some form of interpretive performance art.

 

The Trump administration’s aversion to process norms is real, but Van Erem vastly inflates their importance because her motive seems to be to fatally undermine federal application of Title VI processes to Jews. Therefore, the occasional example of genuinely inappropriate interference in education—Trump’s team proposing external curriculum monitors at Harvard, for example—must be exaggerated into something that rises to the level of actionable legal reprisals, such as “gross mismanagement, by departing from investigative sequencing and quality controls as required by regulation.”

 

That last point, the desire to put in legal jeopardy those who investigated anti-Semitism at top universities, is key to understanding this whole event.

 

Like clockwork, Jamie Raskin, the Maryland congressman and ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, took the baton handed to him by Van Erem and promised retribution for Trump officials. He called the anti-Semitism investigations a “frame-up operation” and threatened to push changes to the Civil Rights Act itself.

 

Raskin’s promised lawfare against federal employees involved in strengthening the enforcement of civil-rights law is no doubt the goal of complaints like those voiced by Van Erem. Raskin, further, is the perfect receptacle for these complaints. His Jewishness provides cover for Democrats who are, as Raskin presumably is, intent on dismantling federal protections for Jews and insulating the Democratic Party from accountability for its exploding anti-Semitism.

 

Raskin is also a co-sponsor of legislation that would enforce a partial arms embargo against Israel. He has fought anti-Semitism-related legislation and has been critical of Israel’s response to the October 7 massacre since the beginning of the Hamas-instigated war.

 

Raskin also demanded testimony from Harmeet Dhillon, the Justice Department’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, alleging that it was a “a distinct possibility” that Dhillon “deliberately orchestrated a scheme to attack universities, their faculties, and their administrators for political purposes while defrauding the American people and the courts.”

 

If the Democrats, as expected, win control of the House in the midterms, they are vowing to use this power to make government officials pay, and pay dearly, for daring to investigate universities’ discrimination against Jewish students. In the past, this would have struck most observers as a bizarre choice of priorities. In 2026, it’s what the public has come to expect from Raskin and company.