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Rose Horowitch
The Atlantic
Excerpt: Even before the Ivy League upheavals of the past two years, Jewish students had been slowly drifting away from the elite campuses of the Northeast. Now, as some seek respite from the protest movement that erupted after the Israeli response to the October 7, 2023, Hamas invasion of southern Israel, the drift has become more like—sorry—an exodus. And selective colleges outside the Northeast, sensing an intensifying disdain for Ivy League schools among Jewish teens and their parents, are tripping over one another to recruit these students.
Frank Bruni
New York Times
Excerpt: What Trump and his allies are doing is no targeted effort to correct that. It’s a sweeping, indiscriminate, performative smackdown of elite institutions by a crew trying to solidify its power under the banner of anti-elitism. It doesn’t attempt to usher those institutions from a place of bias and extremism to one of neutrality and moderation. It answers excess with excess, orthodoxy with orthodoxy, censorship with censorship. And it disregards the damage it’s doing.
Cathy Young
The Bulwark
Excerpt: Last week's right-wing freakout over the Cracker Barrel logo redesign—apparently amounting to white-guy erasure—had more than its share of sublimely ridiculous moments. But none, perhaps, were more emblematic of the current “anti-woke” crusade than the call to action from author, activist, and Manhattan Institute fellow Chris Rufo.
Of course, what also makes it noteworthy is that Rufo isn’t just some random social-media blowhard. In recent months, he has emerged as the unofficial ideologue of the Trumpian assault on the liberal cultural establishment.
Hugh E. Brennan
October 12, 2023
Well, Duh! We far-right, hard-right, ultra-conservative, and now, ultra-MAGA radicals, have been yapping about this for five decades or more. If you haven’t heard from birth up that you won the lottery by being born in good old USA and that that magical place was made possible by a long, slow, grindingly difficult, and often bloody political evolution. Repeated exposure to the ideas, events, and personalities that brought to life this cornucopia of comfort and security is the only possible way to generate mass comprehension of the duties and privileges of citizenship in our federal republic.
However, we have reached the sad point that knowledge of civics is insufficient. The fundamentals of fairness, reasonableness, and comity are absent in the worldview of too many. Notions of honor, integrity, and virtue aren’t even sufficiently considered to be dismissed. They are the vocabulary of an unknown and unstudied language. The mob yowling for cancellation and executing their heckler’s veto believes that free speech is, in itself, a criminal tool of oppression and exploitation. Clearly, they would, if afforded the opportunity run the camps.
Education, faith, and the family falling apart at the same time is the greatest test the Republic has ever faced. We’ve got iconoclasm without any icons. I’ve never met a statue-killer who knows anything in particular or who has read a “whole book” about the subject of their furor.