Strange things are afoot at the GOP's circular firing squad: Ukraine/Israel funding, Mayorkas, and the Columbia hearings

 Congress has been interesting for the last few days.  Let us consider.

The Senate took up the impeachment of Mayorkas, and quickly dismissed it as the baseless, partisan move that it was.  The House of Representatives impeached Mayorkas because they cannot impeach Biden, so it was a gesture for the hardliners.  The Senate spared everyone.  The GOP did not really need a silly show trial, which would not have turned out well for them, in addition to wasting time, and the Democrats have better things to do, except that they cannot manage to do any of them, but it was interesting to see the positive-sum action.

Yet let us turn to the more interesting news.  Speaker Johnson appears to be moving forward on foreign aid packages for both Ukraine and Israel, thereby showing once again that I am wrong and an idiot.  Would this have happened without Iran's strike on Israel?  Probably not, so I could pull the Tetlock maneuver of saying that I would have been right, but for Iran's unpredictable strike on Israel.  Yet it happened, so my prediction that the GOP would never approve funding for Ukraine was wrong.  Will Democrats actually approve funding for Israel?  The same principle applies.

Where does this lead?  The rumblings are grumbling, or perhaps the grumblings are rumbling for a motion to vacate, and enough Republicans may be willing to support it, but at this point, because it is happening in response to the foreign aid, Johnson may actually be saved by Democrats, so the likelihood of Johnson being removed is rather low.  At this point, I do not expect Johnson to be removed.  Count those votes, and here is how it plays out.  If Marjorie Taylor Greene and the others who are threatening a motion to vacate expect the Democrats to save Johnson, then it is irrational to call for the vote because they will lose, and then face punishment.  As Verbal Kint said in The Usual Suspects, "how do you shoot the devil in the back?  What if you miss?"  Or as the old adage goes, if you rebel against the king, you must ensure that you win.  Or more famously, none dare call it treason.

If the Democrats intend to save Johnson's speakership, or "adopt Mike," referencing Matt Gaetz's comments on Kevin McCarthy, then Greene and others will not introduce the motion to vacate.  Will the rebels try to extract some concession?  Perhaps, but it is unclear what concession they can extract.  Something happened when Iran attacked Israel, and it seems to have revived the ghost of Ronald Reagan.

The GOP did have at least one moment, hauling a terrible person in front of hearings led by another terrible person.  Rep. Elise Stefanik got to look like a fine, upstanding citizen and defender of the Jewish community because the person on the other side of the room was Minouche Shafik, President of Columbia University.

That clip I posted recently about recruitment to terrorist organizations at American colleges?  Columbia.  They do not like Jews at Columbia.

Of course, as I read the news about Columbia, they keep referencing the deteriorating situation and arrests at my own alma mater, Pomona College, where I would no longer be safe, so to Hades with my alma mater, they will never get any more of my money.  I wish I could say that I am shocked.

Regardless, Columbia is the most anti-Semitic institution in the country, and Stefanik got to put on a show, but Shafik had the examples of the previous three, knowing what not to say.  Still, the American system of higher education is in a bad way.

At one point, I was skeptical of the Gramsci/Marcuse line about the "long march through the institutions."  No more.  This is happening.  This has been happening for decades.  At this point, I am looking back at the Yuri Bezmenov interview.  Every once in a while, some neo-McCartyist paranoiac looks back at this thing as says, OMG, the Soviets are winning from the grave!

No.  But they took inspiration and lessons from Gramsci and Marcuse, who are the same sources as academic leftists, so of course you see a convergence.  Where it really does get more troubling is that anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, including those that proliferate within academia, really do originate within the Soviet Union.  See, again, Izabella Tabarovsky's analysis.  Bezmenov would tell us that this is not a coincidence.  Is it?  I don't know, but I doubt it, given that the faculty who spread this garbage are avowed Marxists.

So behold, Columbia University, worst of the worst, but hardly alone, and so reprehensible that they make Elise Stefanik look morally upstanding.  It's like putting me next to Peter Dinklage.  I look tall.

OK, bad analogy.  I'm only slightly short.  It's like putting Peter Dinklage next to a legless toddler.  (Stefanik is Dinklage.)

Yet what is the point here?  Granted, it was nice to see a couple of administrators fall, because that's always nice, but can Congress actually do anything?  No.  Here is the problem.  There is nothing that faculty or administrators can do about the anti-Semitism that is rampant among the student bodies of so many campuses.  They are reinforcing the anti-Semitism, which is horrible, but they cannot cure it.  Why?  The students show up with a set of attitudes.

Here's what happens.  Most students are absolutely not anti-Semitic.  Let's be clear about this.  Most students are not political at all, and those who are have a range of positions.  What has happened is that a core is always activated and radicalized, in any generation.  The problem is that the process that has been activating and radicalizing the youngest generation has been getting crazier.  See:  Gramsci and Marcuse.  Most students are apolitical, they have a range of positions, and while we can reasonably discuss various generational issues, there is a lot of hyperbolic, overblown bullshit about the youngest generation because that's just what the oldsters do, and as I converge towards oldsterism, I need to check my own tendencies towards get-off-my-lawn-ism.

But the radicals of this generation are a little different.  The radicals of the 60s were peace activists and civil rights activists.  The radicals of my generation were looking for a cause, and a little muddled and lost because honestly, the world was a little too good to breed real anger, so mostly, they were silly, but they were there.  This generation's radicals have some strange and horrible beliefs, which we are seeing on display on college campuses with the threats and harassment of Jews.  This is what follows from the oppressor-oppressed framework that they have been taught, by activist/teachers at the K-12 level who think that the purpose of education is not to impart life skills, but to create activists, which comes from the Paolo Freire model of education.  Not all teachers believe this, not all teachers who do manage to get students to believe this, but when the stars align/misalign, the result is the production of 18-year-olds who think that the world consists of oppressors and oppressed, the former are evil, the latter are good, and that their fundamental tasks in the world are to classify everyone into one or the other category so that they can figure out whom to fight.

This follows directly from Freire, whose model of education is the long march through the institutions.  Does it actually convince the totality of a generation to turn into cultural revolutionaries?

No.

But it means that the ones already predisposed towards that mindset are worse, because instead of fighting to end the Vietnam War and desegregate the South and fight the true good fight, they cast about looking for an enemy, defined by power, status, and privilege, seek to tear down, and elevate anyone classified as oppressed indifferent to any moral classification of deeds.  They excuse, defend, and even advocate literally raping Jews to death because once you classify Jews as the oppressor-class, they are the enemy to be fought, and morality depends on your location in the oppressor-oppressed dyad, not guiding rules.  The problem is that they believe this.  They have been taught this.

Before they ever got to college.

And "Zionist" is dog-whistle (bullhorn) for "Jew."  Anyone who claims not to know that is either stupid or lying.

Here's the problem.  What does Congress want to do, tell professors how to teach?

Um... academic freedom.  I will defend the academic freedom of my most virulent opponents.  To quote Evelyn Beatrice Hall, whose statement is so often misattributed to Voltaire, "I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."  Do they defend mine?  Of course not, but I do not control them.  I only control my own actions, so I can only seek virtuous action.  If they will not act virtuously, that is their shame, their own harm to their own humanity, and my task is virtuous action.

So I defend free speech, including the speech rights of those whose speech is most odious, guaranteed most strongly in the form of academic freedom.

Congress has zero business telling college professors to change their/our curriculum, and one of the interesting moments in the hearings was when Shafik was confronted with the fact that letters condemning student threats to Jews were not taken very seriously by the recipients of those letters.

Well of course not.  The anti-Semitic students at Columbia have the full support of the faculty, and they all know it.  You cannot construct rules that run opposite to culture, so whatever the institution says is fundamentally meaningless.

And indeed, that is true across a range of institutions.  Rules that run contrary to culture will not be enforced.

How does that culture come to be?

Gramsci.  Marcuse.  The long march through the institutions.  In most colleges and universities, and even more so in K-12, most kids just do not care about politics, and those who do are not anti-Semitic.  They have a range of opinions, but those who deviate from the party line are terrified into silence by the screaming anti-Semites and otherwise brainwashed radicals.  Some of these kids really are scary, but most are just quiet and nice.

Meet these kids.  Not the activists, but the ones who are not steeped in politics.

They're nice.  The issue is that by the time the radicals have gotten to us, they've already been radicalized.

So nice show, Elise.  The show missed the real point, I think, but it was a nice show.