Tomorrow’s deep state is camping on front campus today
Last decade, when student protests flared up at places like the University of Missouri and censorious students at places like Michigan and Middlebury shouted down and mobbed speakers they disagreed with, it was common for critics to shake their heads and say wait until they get into the real world.
We have since learned that the joke was on us. The humorless censors took over newsrooms and got their bosses fired for running op-eds they disliked — all while claiming these “bad” opinions endangered them. The little Javerts moved into the workforce and became orthodoxy police in HR departments and in academia.
The screaming mobs reached critical mass in corporate America and weaponized their angry intolerance on social media.
Nobody should be so sanguine in 2024.
Yes, it’s easy to point and laugh at the front-campus campers who protested for the displaced orphans of Gaza while demanding their protests be catered.
It’s tempting to think these young and entitled radicals will face a rude awakening in the adult world, where there is no meal plan and the average landowner is a lot less forgiving of having his land and building forcibly occupied.
Yes, you can satisfy yourself with the thought that many law firms and federal judges won’t hire the law students currently boycotting finals in order to support Hamas.
But once again the joke will be on us.
On the final night of their encampment at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.’s Foggy Bottom neighborhood, the protesters projected an image of flames on the large U.S. flag hanging over the quad. Above the flames were the words, “Gaza lights the spark that will set the empire ablaze.”
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This casual call for a global Islamic jihad against the United States should not be taken too literally — these students will be in their K Street internships by June. But we should take it seriously because in a few years, these students will probably populate the halls at the other august institution in Foggy Bottom.
If history is a guide, these are tomorrow’s entrenched foreign service officers and burrowed-in bureaucrats immune to democracy and antipathetic to the United States of America.
