A Failure To Plan

I have been reading recently how radical Islamists set out to capture American universities over the past few decades. (Here and here.) They saw “higher education” as a way to influence debate and policy and a way they could “win” over the long term.

Billions of dollars poured into American institutions to fund new departments and programs focused on the Middle East and Islamic Studies. Of course, the great majority of these professors espouse anti-Israel views.

Communist China has had a decades old program to take over American universities. Beijing put Confucius Institutes on more than one hundred campuses.

Communist China also poured millions of dollars into American universities. They sent tens of thousands of Chinese communist students to be educated in the United States and to spy on other Chinese students on campus.

Books have been written about how the LGBTQ movement set out to take over American culture and to own the schools from the earliest grades through the universities.

Why are all these groups so focused on schools? Because capturing the rising generation is how you win. It’s how you “fundamentally transform” a country.

It seems that virtually everybody had a plan to use American education to promote their agendas, often radical and suicidal ideas, except for the United States. Our elites did not have a plan to preserve America by teaching our children why this country is an exceptional nation worth fighting and dying for.

In fact, if they had any plan at all, it was the exact opposite – to use our universities to build the new socialist, neo-Marxist America.

And now we are where we are. 

Abraham Lincoln warned us. He was concerned that veterans from the Revolutionary War were rapidly passing away and that the young people of his day would not see their wounds and would not know the sacrifices made for their freedom.

Ronald Reagan warned us. In his Farewell Address, Reagan talked about the need for “an informed patriotism.” He asked, “And are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world?”

During the Reagan administration, I went after textbook publishers for teaching American students to be neutral in the struggle between America and Soviet communism.

I was dragged before the Senate by outraged Democrat and Republican senators. They weren’t angry at the textbook publishers – they were furious at me for raising the issue!

Donald Trump tried to warn us. He based his campaign on the theme of American greatness. He created a commission to report on how the schools could teach patriotism and love of country. But Joe Biden disbanded the commission on his first day in office.

And here we are now.

Barbarians Inside The Gates

Between the cowardice of administrators and the radicalism of many students, it’s clear that these campus protests are not going to stop on their own.

The only “silver lining” is that the academic year is winding down and classes will be over soon. It will be interesting to see if the campus unrest will morph into urban unrest over the summer.

Will we see more things like blocked bridges and streets? Will the occupation of university buildings move from the campus to banks, churches and restaurants?

In addition to the obvious anti-Semitism and anti-Israel sentiment, these student protesters and their allied agitators are also deeply anti-American. They were the same people tearing down statues of our heroes a few years ago.

At Harvard this weekend, campus radicals took down the American flag and put up the Palestinian flag. At George Washington University, they draped the statue of Washington with a keffiyeh, the scarf that has become a symbol of anti-Zionism and Palestinian nationalism.

Several years ago, I sent a film crew to George Washington University and asked the students there a series of historical questions. They all had the same answer – George Washington. Virtually none of the students got any of the questions right.

They knew nothing about Washington, our first president, and the namesake of the university they attended. So, to these students it’s no big deal to put a flag of a foreign movement around his statute.

The merciful thing would have been to put a blindfold on Washington’s statue so he wouldn’t have to see the insanity running rampant on campus.

Our History

If George Washington were alive today, I have no doubt which side he would be on. He would be standing with the Jewish students on our campuses and on the side of Israel.

In August of 1790, Washington wrote to the Congregation Yeshuat Israel of Newport, Rhode Island, the largest Jewish community in America at the time. He concluded his letter with this “prayer:”

“May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.

“May the father of all mercies scatter light and not darkness in our paths, and make us all in our several vocations useful here, and in his own due time and way everlastingly happy.”

Trump’s Big Lead

The latest CNN poll has leftists reaching for the Maalox. It finds Donald Trump up six points, 49% to 43%, over Joe Biden in a head-to-head contest. Trump’s six-point lead is outside the poll’s margin of error. For comparison, Joe Biden was up six points over Trump at this point in 2020.

In a five-way race with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Green Party candidate Jill Stein, and socialist Cornel West, Trump is up nine points:

Trump 42%

Biden 33%

Kennedy 16%

West 4%

Stein 3%

In contrast to some other recent polls, this CNN poll clearly indicates that Kennedy is a greater threat to Biden than Trump, which makes sense given that Kennedy is pro-abortion and all in on “climate change.”

A nine-point win by Trump would be a national landslide. While Bill Clinton’s eight-point reelection victory in 1996 came close, there hasn’t been a presidential election won by nine points or more since Ronald Reagan’s 18-point victory over Walter Mondale in 1984.

There is more bad news for Biden in the CNN poll. When voters were asked to rate the presidencies of Biden and Trump, 61% of voters said Biden’s presidency has been a “failure,” while 55% said Trump’s presidency was a “success.”

And in related news, the latest Gallup poll finds that Joe Biden is the most unpopular president in modern American history.

Of course, every poll is just a snapshot in time. There will be many surprises between now and November that can alter the political landscape and change opinions.

Biden’s Dangerous Joke

The annual White House correspondents’ dinner was held this weekend. The event is a “roast” of the president and Washington politics.

There’s not much to say about the leftist president meeting with leftist reporters at the big leftist dinner every year, while Jew-hating leftists demonstrated outside. 

But one of the most tasteless jokes that I have ever heard at that event was uttered by Joe Biden, who said:

“I see Kamala Harris is here. I like science, too. Madame Vice President, did you know if you throw a fat political enemy and a skinny one out of a hotel window, they’d hit the ground at the same time? It’s true. Maybe you’d like to try that with Trump and RFK Jr.?”

It’s ironic that Biden made a joke about what Vladimir Putin has been known to do to his political opponents. Several Putin opponents have died after “falling” out of windows.

But it was disturbing for another reason. Biden’s political allies on Capitol Hill are trying to take Donald Trump’s Secret Service protection away, and the Biden administration refuses to provide Secret Service protection to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

When you couple those facts with a president joking about throwing his political opponents out of a window, it’s no laughing matter.