Dazed and Confused

Students that support Hamas at elite universities should be blacklisted. Full stop.

It drives me crazy every time I hear it.  “We need less taxes.” “We need less dumb people.” “We need less cars on the road.” Gawd. Like screeching breaks. It’s FEWER! FEWER cars on the road. Fewer taxes. Fewer dumb people. Do you hear that?  Do you hear how much better that sounds? It’s less gasoline, fewer gallons of gas.  You hear that?  Yet, “less” is everywhere, in newscasts and drama series and supposedly educated podcasts where it is properly not supposed to be. It drives me nuts. Why don’t all these “smart” people know how to speak? All this nonsense about “their,” “they’re,” “there” and “principle” and “principal” and the MOST obvious sin is oblivious to everyone. Who let you on TV anyway? Don’t you have writers and editors and people who went to Columbia editing your newscast? FFS.

Lately, various political pundits have had a debate to how much “youthful indiscretion” should be tolerated in our elite schools – if by “indiscretion” you mean virulent intolerance and antisemitism. Candance Owens and Megyn Kelly, normally two women who are increasingly finding themselves on the same page regarding Covid and other culture war issues, sparred over how much the follies of youth should follow a student after college. For instance, if those follies included things like shouting “From the river to the sea” and violently banging on their college library doors whilst Jewish students cowered behind them. Considering this has been happening to Jews for as long as living memory allows, I would say at least as long as that.

When I got out of college, I tried to get a job writing for anyone. It didn’t matter… magazines, the news, TV.  I even tried to be a stringer for the newspaper. Any publisher would do. I did manage to get into one for a very short while. It was at that point I realized that they had only hired me because I knew how to use Excel and none of the NYU or Vassar graduates I was surrounded by, did. Had it not been for that one skill, rare at the time, I would have never even seen the inside of a publishing house. I didn’t have the internships done in New York City. I didn’t have a parent on the board of Conde Nast or The New York Times Company. Most importantly, I never went to the right school. No, if I had wanted a job anywhere, doing anything good, that paid anything close to well, especially writing for a major newspaper, I would have had to have gone to Brown or better. I didn’t.  Instead, I went to a second-tier state school where I learned from former Yalies everything I needed to know about Shakespeare and the Bible and feminist theories of science. Knowing these things has never made me a dime.  It probably won’t in the future as my writing is entirely free. (So far.)  I can thank Bill Gates and Microsoft for almost every dollar I have ever made. It was just enough to pay my rent in the city. Short of being supported by someone very rich, there was no way I could afford to work a free internship for any length of time. As it was, I barely slept between my main gig and my second gig. That was for people who had their parents pay their rent.

But it didn’t stop there. From there I would go onto investment banking (Excel again) where I was also surrounded by people my age who went to MUCH better schools than I. They were all junior analysts and most of their worked seemed to be running around for much more powerful men and crying. Honestly, I had no idea what they did, I just knew they made a lot of money at it. I never begrudged their success, but I wondered what difference between us was so vast that I couldn’t have done that too for 80 hours a week and a lot better pay. What I did know was that no matter what I learned or what I did, those doors would never open for me, and I was regulated to jobs like “assistant” or “receptionist” or “word processor.”  No one ever even asked to see my degree, and as far as I know, they never checked if I had one. It wasn’t the right school, so it didn’t really matter.

Maybe I am dumb. I certainly did not have a “tiger mom.” School was a miserable experience and until college, I hated every single minute of it. I avoided doing anything that I could, coasting on natural talent and the distractibility of parents with too many problems and divorces.  I did not even think of going to college until my stepmother insisted I do it. She was a rah-rah feminist, whose own father dismissed her aspirations, saying that her time was better spent finding a husband. The idea of going to the Seven Sisters or the Ivies or Stanford, nah brah, it was enough for me and my family I was the first girl to get a degree, notwithstanding its uselessness.  In the time since then, I’ve come to wondering what would have happened if my childhood hadn’t been so chaotic? If I had been coached to take the SAT? If I had been encouraged, even though clumsy with runner’s asthma, to take up a sport and forced to practice my violin – then given a private tutor when the public school stopped offering lessons? What if I had been told, “Dartmouth is doable?”  Would I even be here?  In this place? I don’t know.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out the math when it comes to Israel and Gaza. You would have to be willfully ignorant not to understand that Israel is a tolerant and diverse country with fair courts and fair elections, as opposed to Gaze, a violent and oppressive theocracy. You would have to ignore history entirely to not accept that the Gazans have been offered deal after deal after deal, all of which they rejected because none of those deals involved the wholesale murder of the Jews. And deals for land that they don’t really have claim to anyway. You would have to refuse the sight of your own eyes not to believe that the October 7^th incursion was a montage of atrocities.

While it’s fair to question what is and is not real after the trauma of the last few years, to think that October 7th was some kind of “psyop” is approaching the conspiracy level of “birds aren’t real.”  Students from the elite collages cannot be so credulous. Surely, they can afford the best information that money can buy. Or is their parent’s success in the academy and business and law and government just pure luck? Here’s the thing: they should know.  These are supposedly the smartest among us, not just some kid from a community college taking courses in C++. And not someone repeatedly punched in the head like Jake Shields.

These are the ones that will, on the day of their graduations, have their tickets punched into the halls of academia, of Wall Street, of Big Law and Big Media.  The things they write and say will be used in every precedential case law, every financial report, broadcast on every TV, in every airport lounge in America and Canada and the world. They will decide when to go to war, they will decide when to make peace, they will decide who lives and who dies. They need to be smart. They need to be sagacious. They need to have a rock-solid moral compass. And they need to be on **my** side, the libertine prole who can’t afford to jet off to Ibiza when it’s raining and cold and too crime-y because the police have been defunded.  

Regardless of what my values may be, I need to trust these people…THESE PEOPLE…to make the right decision in regard to MY freedom, MY happiness, MY security, MY life… and I can’t trust them. I *don’t* trust them, and I don’t see myself ever trusting them. Because if they truly believe that Gaza is just a helpless naïf nation, victim of terrible circumstances that they didn’t do anything at all to deserve, blameless in the face of their own destruction…. then these students are stupid. You can’t unlearn stupid. And if you are that stupid, you shouldn’t be in an elite college. You shouldn’t even be in my college. And if you will never stop being stupid, you shouldn’t be in college at all, quite frankly.

You could say they were enticed by professors that were badly motivated. That is the refrain coming from their apologists, like Ms. Owens and Vivek Ramaswamy. It’s all the fault of professors and exchange students and 2nd generation immigrants that are just Manchurian candidates for Hamas. Maybe they have reasons, maybe even good ones. It’s not beyond imagination that there are, embedded in the ranks of nubile co-eds and pretend sophisticates, the sons and daughters of Palestinians that suffered at the hand of some Israeli settler, or trigger-happy soldier.  It’s just those reasons don’t work for my benefit. I’m not willing to trade civilization itself for some rough justice to people on the other side of the world.

In the end, I’m in this world for myself, my family, my neighbors, my country, and countries that still hold a majority of people who think like me. And that’s it. In that order. Everyone else can go fuck right off. And if it benefits Israel that I think like that, so be it. Believing that they were influenced by malicious malcontents simply punts the ball from “they are too stupid to figure out Hamas would kill them” to “they are too stupid to realize their professors and fellow students are feeding them bullshit” And if they DO realize it’s bullshit, they are too cowardly to stand up to it – so it doesn’t matter anyway. They don’t deserve power.

You could say, “they just feel sorry for the Palestinian babies” and in that I have some sympathy. But wielding power also means you have to put aside your feelings for the greater good. If you are entrusted with that kind of power, do you not owe it to the people who entrusted it to you to act in their best interest? And not the in the interest of a people who would tear down the West and its edifices given a sliver of chance? What about our babies? Do they not matter? Fine, don’t do it then. Quit Harvard and Yale, go work with the babies and the poor or the peace corps. Surrender the influence that you would have if you, instead of being a waitress at Hooters, were appointed to the Supreme Court. Otherwise, don’t cry to me about babies. I’m almost certain there is significant overlap between Harvard Hamas supporters and the people wanted Roe v Wade to remain. What about those babies?

The problem with stupid, or just not that smart, is that intelligence is on a bell-shaped curve, and there are many more average people then truly smart people. Even truly smart people make mistakes. Sam Harris cannot bring himself to credit Trump with competence because for all his knowledge of the geopolitical world, he still thinks he can reason the world out of its stupidity and aggression. Trump knows, maybe intuitively, that you cannot. You can only threaten it, and if necessary, attempt to raze, pulverize and obliterate it, until the dumb become so afraid they find something else to do and the violent despair of success.

Trump, with all his madness and bluster, held the line through a game of chicken he played (and is currently playing) with the world. He did it in Europe when he threatened to pull out of NATO. He did it in Canada when he slapped tariffs on aluminum over dairy exports. He did it over pharmaceuticals when he threatened to pass down an EO, demanding they give Americans the same prices as the rest of the world. And he did it with North Korea and China and Mexico and even Russia. Again and again, Trump understood that in the world of foreign relations, you need three things: hard power, a willingness to use it, and surety that your enemies know you will. Sam does not get that (or maybe he does and just can’t bear it) so instead Sam fetishes Trump Academy or Jan 6^th or anything else to avoid the conclusion that reason doesn’t always work. That doesn’t make him stupid, it just makes him pathetic. And dangerous when confronted with a problem that has no good solutions. He who hesitates is lost.

But true stupidity, earnest stupidity, like the kind that comes up with the slogan “Gays for Gaza,” needs to end and end quickly. Our elite schools are worthless if the students are just not smart. They are nefarious if they don’t nurture intelligent bravery. And they are absolutely toxic if they don’t dissuade their students from the idea that being good and being smart are mutually exclusive. Cowardice is not a virtue, and if your friends only will like you if you repeat things you KNOW are not true, like you can “not believe in war”, they aren’t your friends. Apparently, they have some kind of death wish to boot.

If these supposedly top schools don’t provide the brilliant and the brave to industries that manage your retirement funds or judges that may lock you up for the rest of your life, what is it they are doing exactly? Elite schools need to provide to the government not just smart people, but shrewd and brave people who know when they are being threatened, and what actually to do, when faced with a threat that is potentially civilization ending – existential or otherwise.  And most importantly, they need to be loyal to the ideals that matter to civilization.

They need to be smart enough to understand that these Western values and ideals aren’t just good for me and mine but good for them too. They need to know like the sun will rise in the east, that anything else, especially the kind of thought that comes out of Gaza, is a promise of misery and destruction. We can disagree, but we shouldn’t if by doing so undermines the underpinning of what enables us to walk outside in the sunshine, with little concern of dying. Or worse. Well, apparently, “Gays for Gaza” and their fellow travelers are not that smart. So instead, they do what the Palestinians have done all this time: blame the Jews.  It’s time the smart people that are left culled the herd.  I’m looking at you Steven Pinker.

There are only so many smart people in the world and they are quickly being overrun by the stupid. Surely, there are some simply misguided smart people in the crowd. But those people should be clever enough to figure out, very quickly, that they need to do something else and get out of the way. Mr. Harris has already started to obliquely and begrudgingly admit there might be more to Trump than he figured.  Or perhaps the intelligent in these ivies will be able to surmount the roadblock and succeed anyway, by starting their own business, through familial connections or some other superior talent that forgives youthful sins. But we need to stress test our elites because they have failed us now at every turn.  Trump and his administration seems to be the only ones able to do that.

So, no, they shouldn’t be able to land interviews with investment banks and white shoe law firms and Conde Nast because their resumes carry the imprimatur of Harvard and Stanford and Columbia and NYU. They shouldn’t be able to waltz into the kinds of firms and companies that would have never, ever, looked at me because I came from a second-tier state school with mediocre grades and didn’t have the money to work for free in NYC.  Doors should not automatically open for them because they paid someone to take their SATs or some NGO on the Arabian Peninsula or Detroit felt sorry for them. No one ever felt sorry for me, or at least, not enough to give me a free ride to Yale or lower the standards so I could hop the line like a subway turnstile. These students should not progress down this road because are dunces with poor judgement, and they will make even more stupid decisions when they are senators, and CEOs and judges.  We can’t afford that. America can’t afford that. The World cannot afford that either.

Finding badly motivated individuals will be easy. They will give themselves away, resort to violence, cross some line as they find their ranks thinned, their students permanently burned. It will break the spell. But in the meantime, we need to reject the ones that can’t see through the bullshit or are to insipid and craven to call it out. The blue haired, gender queer, white girls who are too cowardly to resist their clique’s peer pressure are going to turn back the clock on years of feminism that convinced men that women should be allowed to vote.  Find the ones ripping down posters and screaming in the faces of Jews and tell them the next thing they are going to wind up doing is asking if “you want fries with that.” Or just mace them like the rabid creatures they are. Maybe they should just try to find a husband.

We want students that can act as leaders of The West in a way that preserves The West and all that is good about it: its tolerance, its innovation, its diversity, its wealth, its freedom, its relative lack of horrific violence.  That is what we expect of students, who, by dint of attending MIT and Carnegie Mellon, get handed the keys to the kingdom after graduation and why we have “elite” schools in the first place. Otherwise, they can attend the school of hard knocks, which as I know, is a fine school indeed.