How America's universities became hotbeds for terrorist sympathizers

University campuses nationwide are under siege by students celebrating Hamas’s attack against Israel on October 7, which was the worst single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.  At the University of Washington, a group of protestors distributed pamphlets with images celebrating Hamas terrorists paragliding into a concert and murdering civilians. At George Washington University, Hamas sympathizers projected the message "glory to our martyrs" on the side of a campus building, an explicit celebration of genocidal terrorism. At my alma mater, Harvard, students signed a letter stating that they "hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible" for Hamas’s genocidal attack.

These protests have been accompanied by explicit calls for wiping Israel entirely off the map, with chants like "from the river to the sea"—a reference to the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River, with Israel in between—ringing out during mass antisemitic marches.

How did American universities become places where so many students are viciously passionately antisemitic and proudly stand with Hamas terrorists? When did it become acceptable to support terrorists beheading babies and murdering them in ovens, raping women and girls, and mass murdering civilians?

The answer is simple, and sobering: The radical left has taken over our universities and turned them into indoctrination camps. Stating the problem, however, doesn’t mean there is an easy solution. Before we are able to fix anything, we need to better understand how universities became hotbeds for terrorist sympathizers.

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All of this is explained in my brand-new book Unwoke: How to Defeat Cultural Marxism in America. In the book, I trace how Cultural Marxists have progressively and systematically taken over major American institutions and the organs of transmission of ideas. During the 1960s, members of the New Left tried to uproot American society by throwing bricks through windows, planting bombs in restaurants, lighting city blocks on fire, and attacking police officers. These tactics proved too extreme and caused public opinion to turn against them. America is different than Cuba, Russia, China, North Korea, Vietnam, and other nations where violent Communist overthrows succeeded. They needed to be more subtle in their efforts to erode the values of the freest nation in the world.

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So, they shifted to a new tactic: they would launch their revolution by slowly infiltrating the institutions that form the foundation of western society. Left-wing activists embarked on a mission to take over government, boardrooms, Hollywood, and academia—and they’ve been effective.

Universities have been historically siloed off from the rest of society, with the goal that students and professors can spend their time thinking, debating, writing, studying, and reasoning toward the truth. As Cultural Marxism took over, many students—unburdened by the need to work or seek life’s basic necessities like food, water, or shelter, and from the comfort of a taxpayer-subsidized dorm room—have become completely dedicated to cooking up grand Marxist schemes.

At universities, Cultural Marxism has been able to metastasize with minimal outside scrutiny—until these past few weeks.  Americans across the country are now shocked to find out just how radical these beliefs are. They are learning that college students have become so radicalized they chant slogans calling for the annihilation of Israel.

Students of American University attend a campus protest against ongoing Israeli attacks on Gaza in Washington, D.C., United States on November 01, 2023. (Celal Gunes/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Sadly, the despicable marches that we are seeing on college campuses represent the future of American society unless enough good and decent people on both sides of the aisle step up to stop it. We’ve seen some good progress, with law firms and businesses rescinding job offers from openly antisemitic students. Even more people need to stand up and confront this vile rhetoric, defeat the toxic woke ideology indoctrinating students on college campuses, and ensure that our country resembles the one we grew up in.

Unwoke outlines the scope of our problem with the radical left and how its radical ideology is trickling down from universities to boardrooms, the government, Hollywood, and even K-12 schools. Unwoke provides the sorely needed conservative game plan for taking back our institutions.

The Texas senator's new book, Unwoke: How to Defeat Cultural Marxism in America, is now available.

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