Republicans Can’t Defeat Antisemitism Without Fighting All Anti-White Racism
BY: SAMUEL MANGOLD-LENETT | DECEMBER 05, 2023
Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/12/05/republicans-cant-defeat-antisemitism-without-fighting-all-anti-white-racism/
SAMUEL MANGOLD-LENETT
VISIT ON TWITTER@SMLENETT
In the aftermath of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, there has been an uptick in antisemitic activity on college campuses. Across the country, students, faculty, and administrators have expressed their support for the Islamist slaughter of civilians, participated in pro-genocide marches, and physically accosted Jewish students. Campus antisemitism has gotten so severe — with more than 800 reported incidents as of Nov. 20 — that the Department of Education has opened up a series of investigations.
During the first third of November’s Republican presidential debate, candidates discussed how, if elected, their administrations would handle the ongoing eruption in antisemitism both on and off campus. Each condemned anti-Jewish bigotry, while some — notably former Ambassador Nikki Haley, Gov. Ron DeSantis, and Sen. Tim Scott — offered more nuanced insights as to how they would directly combat the issue. Possible solutions included threatening to freeze federal funding for universities allowing for antisemitism and collaboration with terrorists to go unpunished, deporting foreign students who openly support terrorism, and disbanding student organizations providing material support for Islamic terrorist groups.
All of these would be fantastic solutions. Not a single cent of taxpayer money should be sent to a university that tolerates racial bigotry or allows its membership to collaborate with foreign enemies. No foreign individual hostile to the American nation ought to be granted access to its institutions or resources, let alone allowed entry. And no one should be permitted to provide material support to terrorist organizations, Mohammedan or otherwise.
This is pretty basic stuff.
It appears there is a unified Republican front in opposing campus antisemitism, and this is good. But why can’t Republicans similarly coalesce around the systemic anti-white bigotry that is all too present in higher education?
Since the mid-20th century, leftist academics worked to proliferate and mainstream Marxist theories of social revolution and cultural subversion. Race was often the subject of their studies. In these instances, their goal was to exacerbate already existing resentments while inculcating new ones to overcome sociological and anthropological divides. European Marxists animated the masses by agitating socioeconomic frustrations. In the old world, the social order was rigid and limited economic mobility, but intranational ethnic conflict was generally less of an issue. In the U.S., social mobility was economically achievable while race remained a sore topic into the 20th century, so these academics opted to exploit it, seeing it as their best chance to immanentize the eschaton and bring about revolution.
These leftist ideologues viewed less-affluent black people as an exploitable lumpenproletariat with whom they could form a revolutionary vanguard alongside middle-class liberals. The demographic disparities in social and political outcomes this coalition sought to overturn were said to be the fault of bigoted institutional power differentials. Thus, the coalition pushed for radical change in America’s institutions through protest, subversion, infiltration, and, of course, violence.
Outcomes were not equivalent for people of different races. This was attributed to our no-good-very-bad racist progenitors’ fundamental flaws, so these intellectuals created a framework for revolutionary reconstruction.
[READ: Christopher Rufo’s New Book Shows Diversity, Equity, And Inclusion Are The New Face Of Communism]
It is here we find the genesis of critical race theory, DEI, and cultural Marxism. These ideologies are now thoroughly embedded in every major American institution but have made their home in higher education. For instance, for every 100 tenured faculty members on a college campus, DEI staff hold an average of 3.4 positions.
Universities teach people to think in terms of an “oppressed-oppressor” dialectic. World events and their inherent contradictions and resolutions are increasingly viewed exclusively through this lens. The oppressed are the revolutionary class with whom the intersectional coalition aligns itself, and the oppressors are whichever entity most closely resembles Western civilization and its “colonial” tendencies. In this framework, Western civilization and “colonialism” are further wrongly conflated and used interchangeably with “whiteness” to conveniently lump all the left’s enemies into one category.
In the Israel-Palestine conflict, adherents of this view identify Israel as the oppressor and Jews as its avatar. People opting to justify Hamas’ actions in the name of global revolution subsequently target them.
And this is why Republicans at the national level — and those who seek the highest office in the land — are sounding the alarm. This worldview leads to some pretty dark conclusions. Taken to its natural end, this worldview culminates in people getting killed. Its proponents are explicit about this. They applauded Hamas for slaughtering civilians, and they cheered on the rioters and looters who pillaged the country three summers ago. “Decolonization” is the focus of the intellectual movements justifying both events.
Just look at South Africa where, in August, Julius Malema, leader of the Marxist Economic Freedom Fighters Party, led thousands of his followers in chanting “Kill the Boer” amid skyrocketing Boer-murder rates. The corporate press merely brushed off his rhetoric as anti-colonial sentiment. After all, the Boers are the descendants of Dutch settlers in South Africa. Therefore, a prominent political figure calling for their slaughter, while they’re already being murdered, is simply a sign of the oppressed sticking it to the oppressor. An ethnically European population that had no active participation in the colonial era is nevertheless wrapped up in a dialectical power struggle. Their existence is associated with “whiteness,” which is associated with “colonialism,” which is associated with Western Civilization, so calling for their annihilation is morally justified within this framework.
While campaigning for the Democratic Party’s 1988 presidential nomination, Rev. Jesse Jackson led members of Stanford’s Black Student Union in chanting, “Hey-hey, ho-ho, Western Civ has got to go.” Since then, millions of people — students, faculty, and staff — have been subjected to virulent curricula and trainings where Western civilization is denigrated as an oppressive and parasitic colonial force, “whiteness” is treated as a malevolent sociological scourge, the history that ought to unite us is dishonestly rewritten to incite racial animus, and students who deviate from this toxic identitarianism are disenfranchised while others are encouraged to shame white students for the sin of their birth.
Leftist student organizations routinely engage in this activism by inviting speakers to peddle hateful anti-white rhetoric, and left-wing luminaries like Ibram X. Kendi use campus facilities while raking in tens of millions of dollars for “antiracist” research to try to “solve seemingly intractable problems of racial inequity and injustice.”
Frankly, there are innumerable examples of anti-white racism on college campuses. An exhaustive list would hardly be worth anyone’s time. We all know it exists, is systemic, and is supported with our tax dollars.
To add to this discussion, check out the following posting.
Blind tribal resentment will always exist to some extent; some people will always hate others merely for the crime of existing — that’s an unfortunate aspect of human nature. But the systemic anti-white racism and the outpouring of antisemitism in higher education are largely outgrowths of the same schools of thought.
It is good that Republicans are willing to take action against antisemitism, but that’s only one part of this problem. Bigotry should be condemned across the board, and universities should suffer for their role in it. But if the GOP is truly serious about tackling campus discrimination, it needs to rip it out at the roots and address anti-white racism as well.
Leftists will play semantic games, they’ll disingenuously moan about freedom of speech, but enough is enough. A smattering of red-state governments have shown how to root out “divisive topics” that install this worldview through public school K-12 curricula, but they must follow up at the college level. This can be done by reorganizing universities with trusted, ideologically aligned allies. And should a Republican win the White House in 2024, the president should direct the Department of Education to withhold federal funds from academic institutions that disseminate this worldview.
It may be impossible to eliminate bigotry from the hearts of man, but Republicans have the power to stop it from being rammed down our throats at taxpayer expense.
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