Groupthink on the March

Tell me the truth: were you shocked to see the reaction of American academics to the October 7 massacre in Israel? Be honest-- did you expect that the leaders of our great academic institutions-- card-carrying feminists most of them-- would fail to express their rage at the murder of children and the rape of women?

Surely, people who flew into a gale of outrage over misgendering, climate denial and sexual harassment would have found the moral chops to denounce Hamas, as a murderous neo-Nazi cult.

Then again, the mini-minds on the American left had already decided that Trump is Hitler and that Trump supporters are neo-Nazis. Moreover, they have spent the last years inveighing against white supremacists, white privilege and insurrections. They have set the FBI to harass traditional Catholics and suburban mothers who do not want their five year olds to be exposed to explicit porn. Could it be that they were looking in the wrong places?

Apparently, the mini-minds who bought this deception did not have any outrage left to direct at people who were in the business of torturing, mutilating, raping and killing Jews.

That the actions of Hamas were cowardly should not be in question. And yet, Americas universities have made manifest their own special cowardice and have failed to denounce Hamas depravity. To top it off the professoriat and administrations have joined together to defend the people of Gaza against the oppressive Israeli military.

Sad to say, America’s universities are a parliament of the feeble minded. The only Nazis that today’s academics could not denounce were the real ones. 

It should not have come as a surprise. Did you understand that the constant railing about white supremacism and white privilege was really code for hatred of Jews? If you did not, you were not paying attention.

If systematic bigotry made certain members of certain groups underperform chronically, then clearly, those groups that chronically overperformed must have been cheating. This latter group comprised white people, Asians and Jews. 

Now that the diversity industry has taken charge of university hiring and university admissions, how many of those who have received credentials they did not earn are more than happy to attack anyone whose achievements make them look like the recipients of special favors.

Anyway, American universities have largely refused to condemn Hamas, but they now want to oblige Israel not to fight back. Victory for Hamas.

Victor Davis Hanson takes the measure of the dereliction:

The sheer madness that has gripped many elite universities since October 7 and the butchery, rape, torture, and mutilation of some 1,000 Israeli civilians by Hamas murderers have shocked the public at large.

Campus craziness is, of course, nothing new. But quite novel for campuses was the sudden jettisoning of prior campus pretenses. Universities have brazenly dropped their careful two-faced gymnastics to reveal at last–unapologetically, proudly, and defiantly–the moral decay that now characterizes American higher education.

American universities are bastions of groupthink. They enforce ideological conformity, largely because many of their professors and many of their students cannot do more than to intone the party line.

Humanities instruction has long been in decline. In recent years, Hanson points out, the rot has extended to the sciences.

For the last few decades, the public has been willing to put up with all this madness in higher education—even as political correctness squashed free speech on campus and affirmative action descended into woke racial essentialism.

Why?

One: universities assured America that their preeminent math, science, technology, and engineering departments—along with their professional medical and business schools—remained largely apolitical, research-orientated, and meritocratic.

But now, Hanson explains, the armies of the left have moved on to the sciences, the better to extend their hegemony. You will recognize the different fronts in this war against science. 

Hanson points out three areas where our philosopher kings have tried to replace science with dogma. It works because most students and more and more professors cannot do science.

The first involved the response to the Covid-19 pandemic:

During the COVID-19 pandemic, there was systemic, campus-led censorship of dissenting scientific views, witch hunts of distinguished health care professionals, and de facto suppression of open scientific debate over the safety and efficacy of vaccines and the cost-benefit value of the lockdowns.

Medical-school doctors were demonized if they argued that there was scientific support for augmenting COVID-19 treatment with existing cheap, off-label pharmaceuticals, and even vitamin and supplement regimens. Authors of scientifically-based arguments that the origins of the COVID-19 virus was to be found at the Wuhan virology lab in China were demonized and their conclusions smeared rather than refuted.

And then, there was so-called climate science, the kind that provided people with unassailable knowledge about the future. That is, about the pending climate apocalypse. That such assertions were prophecy, not science, did not bother anyone.

In addition, any university-related scientific dialogue over the degree of and remedy for man-made, fossil-fuel-induced climate change must adhere to strict orthodoxies. Any apostates will risk having their careers curtailed and endangered.

Dare we mention that climate change hysteria leads inexorably to the notion that we must repeal the Industrial Revolution and that we should overthrow free market capitalism. 

One might mention that, among the countries in the Middle East that most clearly practice capitalism, is Israel. Obviously, those university students who learned to be warriors in the struggle against capitalism could only cheer the rape and mutilation of Jewish women. 

Third, we have seen a systematic attack on biology, especially on the difference between sexes. By the terms of the new ideology sex is socially constructed. You are the gender you believe yourself to be; delusional beliefs are real and if you do not accept someone’s delusional belief, you will be canceled.

It is also perilous for researchers, doctors, and public-health experts on campuses to question the recent dogma that sex is entirely socially constructed rather than biologically determined.

The consequences of university indoctrination have played themselves out in social media. There, a band of intrepid censors who have taken control of the dissemination of information.

The university-trained computer minds that fuel Silicon Valley’s high tech industry have weaponized their Internet search results to prioritize links deemed socially and politically preferable.

University graduates are also past masters at Internet shadow-banning, doxxing, blacklisting, and canceling any person, institution, or idea that is felt to be detrimental to or at odds with the progressive agenda.

So, America’s youth are true believers in whatever ideological rot is being fed to them. The result is that young adults today are most likely to believe that Israel had it coming to it.

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