The Kids Are Not Alright,

And Maybe We Should Blame Their Teachers

(University of Pennsylvania assistant professor praised Luigi Mangione on Tik Tok)

I am glad to see that the American public is finally concerned about the insane thirst for violence from our young adults.

What became obvious to the Jewish community 14 months ago is finally becoming clear to the rest of the nation – Gen Z is obsessed with political violence.

Millions of Americans became Hamas-supporters AFTER October 7th.

Kids who have never even been in a fist-fight started walking around in Keffiyehs and headscarves to show how much admiration they had for the resistance rapists.

As that violence trickled down and students began getting harassed, choked, beaten unconscious, and held hostage, the American community remained steadfast in its silence.

Non-Jewish Americans follow a very strict neutrality code — when Jews are getting attacked, they close their eyes.

To most Americans, the kids dressing up like terrorists on college campuses were no different than kids dressing up like cowboys and Indians in elementary school.

When Jewish blood actually started to spill, they just looked away.

When a young man tried to assassinate Trump this summer, no one talked about the outpouring of anger that came towards the shooter and his “poor aim.”

The only people I know who still continue to post about gun violence and the need to abolish the 2nd Amendment were also the ones who were most vocally upset that Trump’s life was saved.

That political inversion was quite concerning – you only see people acting and behaving with that much open hypocrisy when they truly no longer believe in their values anymore.

If a person believes that Democrats should win elections because gun violence is bad and the Democrats promised to end gun violence, but, when they realize that the Democrats cannot win that election they start to believe that gun violence should be used against the Republicans, they are no longer participating in politics – they are participating in factionalism.

Politics is the idea that I want my ideas to rule the country; factionalism is the idea that I want my friends to rule it.

This person may have started out caring about gun violence, but, by now, all they really care about is Trump – nothing else matters.

One might think that such beliefs are woefully stringent and inflexible, that they lead one down a path towards dogma and not towards enlightenment.

One would expect this kind of behavior from children raised in Orwell’s 1984, who recited the two minutes of hate everyday.

Why, then, is this happening at what are, allegedly, the sacred halls of western discourse and debate?

Why are Penn graduates assassinating CEOs, and why are Penn professors praising it?

Earlier today, a Penn professor got in trouble for posting on social media that this was the first time she ever felt proud to work at the “University of P3nnsylvania.”

Now, I know this woman – not personally, but I know hundreds of people just like her.

She is gainfully employed at one of the most prestigious universities in the world, yet she has so much disrespect and disdain for that institution that she refuses to even spell out its name.

There are, of course, hundreds if not thousands of academics who would literally kill for her job, which begs the question, why hire her?

Why would Penn want to hire someone who actively hates Penn instead of one of the thousand other qualified academics who might not?

It all comes down to the fact that 80% of American academics are still pushing a political ideology that went out of fashion decades ago.

Until about 1900, there were very few university departments.

There were, in the humanities: Classics, History, Philosophy, Literature, and sometimes Politics.

There were the natural sciences: Physics, Chemistry, etc..,.

And there was Mathematics.

Every other department in the university came later.

The “social sciences” did not exist really until the 19th century.

And each of the social sciences is actually just a semi-quantitative descendant of a particular philosopher or philosophy.

Adam Smith was not an economist; he was a philosopher. The field of economics took the first half of his work, The Wealth of Nations, and used math to turn it into a somewhat predictive model.

Sigmund Freud was a doctor and a philosopher. Ultimately, he developed a philosophical theory that human behavior is affected by both the subconscious and the unconscious minds. The field of psychology took his theories and tested them on large groups of people to test their validity. Once psychology proved his ideas were right, the field was born.

W.E.B. DuBois was a writer and a philosopher. His work, The Souls of Black Folk, is really an oral history of a people more than it is a work of sociology, yet, the conclusions he drew from it were so powerful that an entire university department was born out of it.

Every department at the university has as philosophical antecedent; the problem now is that so many of these departments are built on philosophies of violence.

In the late 19th century, Karl Marx introduced a new type of philosophy into the world which believed that it could predict the future.

It was a kind of philosophy that viewed future events with as much gravity as those of the past.

To a Marxist, the future communist revolution is as real as the American Revolution.

It is not the first philosophical movement to do this, but it is the only one which has lasted long past its anticipated redemption.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the promise of global communism should have died.

Seventy years is a long gestation period – if Marxism was going to work, it would have worked in that time.

However, while much of the world that lived under Marxism was glad to be rid of it, western academics were faced with an existential crisis.

Because so many of them had built their entire lives and careers on Marxist ideas, if they gave up on Marxism, it would have been like giving up on themselves.

So they just didn’t.

They continued to teach their classes the way they always had.

The problem is that Marxism promises a better future, but that future is only possible through violence.

Marxism presupposes that the capitalist and bourgeois classes will always oppose it at all costs; there can be no reconciliation between the proletariat and the ruling class.

Therefore, the only option for the proletariat is to appeal to violence.

That is why all of the most beloved Marxist figures were also the most violent.

No one wears a Karl Marx or Leon Trotsky shirt, but millions of people wear Che Guevarra’s smiling face.

I remember, maybe ten years ago, a friend of mine was wearing a Che shirt. Another friend of mine, a Cuban, whispered quietly, “I wonder if that’s what he looked like when he shot my grandfather in front of his wife and my 2-year-old mother.”

When I was at Princeton, we read a book in one of my classes called, From #Blacklivesmatter to Black Liberation, by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor.

I had not thought about that work until earlier this year when Taylor published a piece called, “The Kids are Not Alright. They Want to be Heard,” in The New Yorker.

Her piece argued that the reason so many kids were acting out on college campuses was because they were so overwhelmed by seeing the “breath-taking violence” of the Gaza War and not having their voices heard.

“Breath-taking” seemed like the wrong choice of words, unless one felt that the violence they were seeing was truly beautiful.

But who would ever find violence beautiful?

After reading that piece, I went back to her work and reviewed my notes in it because, from what I remembered, she was a devoted Marxist and the book argued that the only way there would be any meaningful kind of revolution was through a serious Marxist revolution in America.

As far as academic Marxists go, she was hardcore.

But, if that was her operating philosophy, that all incremental change was inconsequential and that only true revolution would liberate black America, one must assume that she was teaching that philosophy to her students.

I highlight Taylor as an example because I happen to know her work quite well, but she is far from alone in this.

In fact, as these things go, Princeton is one of the least violence-loving campuses in America.

Penn graduated an assassin and has those who yearn for bloodshed on their payroll.

Cornell has a professor who held an impromptu rally to call Hamas’ rape of Israel “exhilirating…” and he is still on the payroll.

Columbia has students who held their own custodial staff hostage, vandalized millions of dollars in property, shut down public transit for multiple days, and a board of directors who is more concerned with protecting those students than the students they terrorized.

Not one of these school can even boast a single professor who spoke out against this kind of behavior.

While this could be due to the cowardice of their professors, I think it has more to do with the politics of their departments.

Professors must be approved for tenure by their department.

If the department is filled with Marxists, they are going to hire other Marxists.

Once you get enough Marxists on the tenure committees, it becomes impossible for anyone else to get tenure.

So the entire university becomes an echo chamber.

An echo chamber that praises revolutionary violence as the only possibility for a better future.

My parents have been stunned at how much arrogance and hubris Luigi Mangione has displayed. Earlier today he shouted at the press saying they were, “Completely out of touch and [it was] an insult to the intelligence of the American people!"

And he is actually half right.

Anyone who thinks the American people are anti-assassination has not spent any time with anyone under 30.

Those of us who grew up in the 90s and 00s grew up with so much peace and prosperity it made us sick.

Not one American man I know in my generation has been in a fight – not one.

Yet how many millions of them clamor about resistance and justice and all that nonsense day in and day out?

The less experience one has with violence, the more one admires the idea of it.

Nowhere could be less violent than a place like Princeton or Penn, so it is not surprising that so many of their professors and students are so comfortable with violence being done to others.

The praise of this assassination is only the latest in a long series of perverse responses to violence, but, hopefully, since this event concerns neither the Jews nor Trump, people might actually pay attention to it.

Your son or daughter might very well be one of the cheerleaders of violence, and you should be very worried about that.

The longer we let this go on for, the more students we will lose to this outdated and violent ideology.

No one is more negatively affected by the behavior of these teachers than their students.

The kids are getting not just a bad education but a wrong education – they may grow up never fundamentally understanding how the world works, and that is a shame.

Moreover, this young man has now given up his life for the cause.

He is 26 years old – how committed to this could he have been?

It is never the professors who get arrested, never the professors who self-immolate for Palestine, never the professors who are leading these marches… they just hide behind their students.

Luigi Mangione, Aaron Bushnell are just some of the names of young people whose lives were corrupted by university professors teaching students to live by dogma as opposed to truth.

The millions of other Americans who praised them have been just as corrupted; they might just be less extreme.

What scared me most about this story is how similar Mangione’s background was to mine. We are both 26 year old, Ivy League graduates, who have been massively disappointed by what our country has had to offer us, albeit for very different reasons.

Murder is wrong, and any understanding I extend to the shooter is not a justification of his actions but rather an attempt to explain what may be the larger issue at stake here.

We have an entire generation of young people who are hopped up on the violent rhetoric of their professors, who graduate from the classroom to Tik Tok, and then their ability to think independently is never seen again.

Marxism lost.

It was and is a bad philosophy, one that no one can seriously build their life around.

Like the Cynicism of Diogenes, Marxism should have been relegated to the annals of history, but it has not because there is an army of academics actively resuscitating it every day.

Until this issue is dealt with, we can expect nothing but this strange pseudo-Marxist bloodlust from young Americans.

Mangione will receive tremendous support from the public, hundreds of women will write him love letters, and there will be massive protests outside of the trial calling for his release.

It will be exactly like the public’s response to the encampments at Columbia.

I just hope that since the victim wasn’t Jewish, people will actually pay attention this time.

~

Spread Love, Spread Light,

Am Yisrael Chai