There is a particular species of ignorance that flourishes in the academy: one that mistakes moral posturing for moral reasoning, slogans for scholarship, and fashionable outrage for historical understanding.
A Guide to Socialism for Ivy League Transgender Climate Racial Studies Majors
BY PAUL PACKER FOR THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR / READ AND SUBSCRIBE TO THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR
I graduated from Columbia University in the mid-1970s, before the opportunity existed for me to study and major in the personally enriching fields of Transgender Studies, Climate and Carbon Windmill Studies, Racial Deconstruction and White Privilege Studies, Women’s and Pronoun Studies, and Palestine River-to-Sea Studies. With so few options before me in those antiquarian days, all I could study was Dead White Men Studies. Accordingly, I majored in political science, took courses in economics, Western Contemporary Civilization, Western Humanities, and English literature. I also took two three-credit courses in Jewish history, one in New Testament, and one in architecture.
With so little to choose from, as compared to the rich and varied contemporary course offerings at the Ivy Leagues, my post-college life options were limited. As a result, I pursued three career fields that were among the few that my academic choices limited for me amid the academically impoverished mid-1970s: (i) a law career, (ii) a career as a rabbi, and (iii) a career as an opinion columnist. What can I say? Now, half a century later, as I look back, I guess I can accept that I lacked the exciting academic options you have enjoyed and, oh well, at least my three careers enabled me to support a family of four children, own a four-bedroom house among similarly deprived people of my generation (including the White-privileged, newly arriving immigrants to America from South Korea and Vietnam, and Americans from India who spell incredibly well).
Just as you have much you could teach me about transgender studies, windmills and climate, and race deconstruction, I share these tidbits from what I learned:
- Rent Control: When the government prohibits landlords from raising apartment rents, the owners generate less revenue. Therefore, they spend less on apartment maintenance, upkeep, and repairs. They provide a bit less heat in the winter and air conditioning in the summer. Eventually, they selfishly determine they can get richer by converting their properties from apartment rentals to condominiums that they can sell. (No, condominiums are not for birth control.) As they take their apartments off the rental market, the local community has fewer apartments left available for rent. New investors entering the real estate marketplace likewise opt for condos to sell rather than apartments to lease out. As fewer rentals are available to the public, the same number of people as before now compete for fewer available homes to lease. Let’s say 500 people are competing to rent 200 apartments, but now those 500 people are competing for only 50 apartments. Do you see how and why the rents shoot up through the roof, leaving only the richest, most White-privileged, Asian American, Indo-Asian, Pacific Islander, Middle Eastern, and enterprising Hispanic and Black people able to rent, while the others get priced out? Where will those who are priced out live?
- Zoning, Climate, and Environment: Let’s say that, to improve the climate and save Earth from destructing in less (fewer) than 10 years, special laws are passed to require all new home construction to meet the strictest of environmental standards and restrictions. Let’s say new building permits can be curtailed if concerned climate activists bring lawsuits to stall them. Do you see why and how that results in fewer houses being built and, ultimately, in a housing shortage? If 500 people would be competing to buy 200 houses but now, instead, find themselves competing to buy only 50 houses, do you see how and why the home sales prices shoot up through the roof, leaving only the richest, most White-privileged, Asian American, Indo-Asian, Pacific Islander, Middle Eastern, and enterprising Hispanic and Black people able to buy, while the others get priced out? Where do those who are priced out live, and what do they do? Rent? Sounds like San Francisco? Silicon Valley?
- Free City Buses: Let’s say that the city government changes policy and allows everyone to ride the city buses free of fare. But let’s say the bus drivers’ unions fight for salary increases, better benefits that wage earners surely deserve, and safer, modern buses to drive. How can the drivers be paid and the buses maintained at top performance and safety standards if no one is paying for the bus rides? Presumably, the city itself has to pay for it. But where does the city get the money to pay for it? Partly from the state government and from the federal government? But what if those governments say, “We are not going to tax people in Binghamton, New York, or Fargo, North Dakota to pay New York City residents to ride their buses for free? Let them pay us to ride our buses for free.” So, where will the free-bus budget come from? The obvious only answer: Tax The Rich. That indeed will work well if The Rich pay the extra tax, based on what they currently pay. So if The Rich currently pay 30 percent of One Million Dollars a year, and now they are told to pay 40 percent, that will add 10 percent of One Million Dollars a year to pay for free bus rides, a perfect solution. But what if The Rich move out of the City to, say, Long Island? Or to Florida or Texas? Or what if they stay mostly in New York City but set up a second home out of state as their permanent residence? And how is it that, come to think of it, The Rich never really pay 30 percent but somehow always manage — very legally — to pay less than expected? And many of The Rich move. Some famous examples: Trump moved from New York City to Florida. So did Rush Limbaugh. Elon Musk moved from California to Texas. Ben Shapiro moved from California; he planted the Daily Wire in Nashville, Tennessee, and moved his family to Florida. My friend Cynthia moved from New York City to Florida. Another from Los Angeles to Florida. Half of my Orange County, California, synagogue congregation has moved to Florida, Texas, Nevada, and Arizona. I have my eyes on moving to a Jewish community somewhere between the River and the Sea, as have approximately 20 other congregational families. So what if The Rich move to different tax jurisdictions?
- Buses as Homeless Shelter: In cities like New York, many homeless people find pitiable shelter in the subway stations and on Manhattan sidewalks. They are cold, damp, dirty. One’s heart melts as one passes them by, seeing them with torn shoes, discarded needles, and other urban paraphernalia. If bus-riding is free, homeless people may find they prefer the warmer, cleaner environment of the city bus as a shelter, and it would offer free accommodation. Bus drivers historically resist suggestions and employer directives that, besides driving the bus, they also must walk over to prone homeless passengers, extended over three seats, endeavoring to forcibly physically remove them from the buses. How will that challenge be met? Will The Homeless agree to sleep on the sidewalks instead? Will passengers reduce the frequency of their free bus rides?
- Taxing the Rich: If you use the tools of social media and look stuff up, you will find the darnedest thing: No matter how high the government taxes The Rich, somehow their lawyers always find legal ways — loopholes — to get around it. People like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett always — legally — pay less than the government expects. Their businesses either move out of the country or into different, low- or no-tax states. They hire brilliant tax attorneys and accountants who carefully study the new tax increases and find legal ways around them. Although famous California movie actors always encourage the state to raise taxes on The Rich and tell the news media, through their press agents, “I am ready to pay my fair share of increased taxes to help the poor,” somehow they end up moving their legal residences to nearby Nevada or Arizona, and the Hollywood movie studios, despite their historical association with “Hollywood,” move their filmmaking out of California to places like Iowa, Hungary, and Canada and remain outside California unless that state government agrees to grant them special tax exemptions that no one else in the state gets if they move back to Hollywood. Which brings back the question: Who pays the bus drivers when bus fares are free?
- City-Run Food Stores: Let’s say the city starts running its own food stores. That only makes sense if the food prices are markedly below regular store food prices. What becomes of the private for-profit food stores? The major powerhouse food chains can absorb shocks to the marketplace. By contrast, small bodegas and the like cannot. So the owners of small private food stores get driven out of business, undercut by the city stores. The city stores have to keep prices really low, even though it is universally known that food stores work on very low margins of only 2 percent markups, relying on volume. If city food stores lower prices below the chain stores, they will be selling food at a loss. Where will the lost money come from? Also, they will have to hire union workers and meet enhanced union demands. In private enterprise, store owners’ livelihoods are on the line, so they will not tolerate workers’ absenteeism, loafing on the job, and incompetence (e.g., forgetting to label food prices correctly, failing to stock and restock aisles promptly, and the like). A critical aspect of foodstore management is ordering as much product as buyers will buy so that sales are not lost because products are unavailable, but not over-ordering because, if product sits too long without being bought by a consumer date, it has to be thrown out. What happens if people choose to buy their bread at the city store, but the local city-store bread-buyer and buyer of other foodstuffs and household goods under-orders? Will people buy half their shopping list at the city store and the other half at the private store? Or will they stand online waiting on “bread lines” for the next bread shipment to arrive? If the store is allocated a specific sum for purchasing food for sale, what will happen when that sum is exhausted, whether because of purchasing incompetence or poor management? And who and how will fraud, waste, and abuse be policed? In private stores, owners aggressively monitor for theft, even if confrontations become socially messy. How will such shrinkage be handled in government stores?
- Arresting the Prime Minister of Israel: Let’s say the prime minister of Israel flies into New York City to address the United Nations General Assembly, as happens every November. If the mayor proceeds, as one such candidate has pledged, to have the prime minister arrested the moment he sets foot in New York City, who will actually arrest him or her? Will it be police from the New York Police Department? What if the president of the United States sends in the National Guard, as the Supreme Court of the United States has ruled he may, would the mayor then enforce his or her pledge by ordering the NYPD to shoot at the National Guard and arrest them? What if the NYPD decides that, since the mayor has pledged to defund the police anyway, they prefer not to engage in a civil war shooting exchange with the National Guard and the United States Marines who would be sent in for back-up?
I offer these comments and questions as one Ivy Leaguer to another. I grew up in a time when my classmates were cisgender and our Supreme Court justices could define “woman.” Some of us sometimes cursed privately but never in public. You are the best and brightest of America today, according to your colleges. Your choices derive from the latest breakthroughs in creative thinking, funded at your universities by the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Apply your wisdom.
Your Fellow Ivy Leaguer,
#MeToo
How Universities Created Zohran Mamdani
BY PAUL PACKER FOR THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR / READ AND SUBSCRIBE TO THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR
There is a particular species of ignorance that flourishes in the academy: one that mistakes moral posturing for moral reasoning, slogans for scholarship, and fashionable outrage for historical understanding. Zohran Mamdani, now the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, represents the perfected specimen of this breed: the educated barbarian.
Consider the extraordinary trajectory that led us here. A man who praised Hamas financiers in rap songs, who declared Israel guilty of genocide within days of October 7, who promises to arrest foreign leaders based on his interpretation of international law — this man now stands poised to govern America’s largest city. He is not some fringe radical clawing his way up from the margins. He is the product of Bowdoin College, one of our finest liberal arts institutions, where his worldview was carefully cultivated and his activism legitimized. (RELATED: Mamdani’s Victory Proves the Dems Have Abandoned Jews)
The pathology began early. At Bowdoin, Mamdani co-founded the college’s first Students for Justice in Palestine chapter, which invited As’ad AbuKhalil, a professor who would later declare that America “made its bed” with the September 11 attacks and had “inflicted many 9/11s on people around the world.” This was not youthful indiscretion but institutional validation: a prestigious liberal arts college providing a platform for someone who celebrated George Habash, dubbed “the godfather of Middle East terrorism.”
Mamdani’s education exemplifies a broader institutional failure. Recent surveys reveal the staggering scope of historical ignorance among young Americans. Nearly half of millennials cannot name a single concentration camp from the more than 40,000 that existed during the Holocaust. In New York — Mamdani’s own state — an astounding 58 percent cannot identify even one. When 63 percent of young Americans don’t know that six million Jews were murdered, and 36 percent believe the number was two million or fewer, we confront an educational catastrophe. (RELATED: Trump v. Harvard: Battle of the Heavyweights)
Most disturbing of all: 19 percent of New York’s millennials believe Jews caused the Holocaust — the highest rate in the nation. Such ignorance doesn’t emerge spontaneously. It requires systematic cultivation by institutions that have abandoned their responsibility to transmit historical truth.
When universities teach students to think in analogies rather than facts, the Holocaust becomes just another data point in the catalog of historical grievances. The systematic, industrial extermination of six million Jews — planned in conference rooms, executed with bureaucratic precision, documented with chilling thoroughness — gets flattened into a generic template. Any military operation that generates tragic headlines can now bear the label of genocide. (RELATED: Let Colleges Fail: Use Creative Destruction)
Mamdani embodies this dangerous alchemy perfectly. When he speaks of “genocide” in Gaza, he does so with the confidence of someone who knows the words but not the music, the terminology but not the truth. He wields the vocabulary of atrocity without comprehending its meaning, transforming historical illiteracy into moral certainty.
The stakes of such ignorance were made starkly clear this month when two world leaders who understood the lessons of history acted decisively to prevent another catastrophe. When President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu recognized that Iran’s nuclear program posed an existential threat to the Jewish homeland, they coordinated strikes against Tehran’s nuclear facilities. “We worked as a team like perhaps no team has ever worked before,” Trump declared, “and we’ve gone a long way to erasing this horrible threat to Israel.” This was “Never Again” in practice — not as a slogan but as a solemn commitment requiring vigilance and, when necessary, action.
They have normalized rhetoric that equates democratic self-defense with terrorist violence.
The contrast with our universities could not be starker. While Trump and Netanyahu acted on the hard-won wisdom of the 20th century, our academic institutions continue producing graduates who cannot distinguish between the Holocaust and contemporary conflicts. The intellectual architecture that creates such distortion is deliberate. Universities have created safe havens for professors like AbuKhalil, who can claim Israel practices worse terrorism than Hamas without facing serious academic scrutiny. They have normalized rhetoric that equates democratic self-defense with terrorist violence, teaching students that moral relativism represents sophisticated analysis.
Holocaust Education
In their zeal to diversify curricula and amplify marginalized voices, these institutions have marginalized the one historical event that most demands sustained attention. Holocaust education, when it exists at all, gets subsumed into broader discussions that dilute its unique horror. Students learn that all suffering is equivalent, all victims interchangeable, all perpetrators merely products of circumstance.
The results speak for themselves. When nearly half of young Americans cannot name Auschwitz, when basic historical facts disappear into academic fashions, we create a generation vulnerable to the very ideologies that once nearly destroyed civilization. Such students can lecture Jewish audiences about their own fears while promoting the very rhetoric that generates those fears — academic arrogance perfected.
The remedy is both simple and radical: mandatory Holocaust education in every university — not merely as a graduate program but as a required undergraduate course. Students should study the Wannsee Conference minutes, read Eichmann’s testimony, examine the railway schedules that carried millions to their deaths. They should understand that when Nazi officials spoke of the “final solution,” they meant exactly what they said.
The data demands urgency. When 80 percent of Americans believe Holocaust education is important to prevent future atrocities, yet basic knowledge continues to erode, universities have failed their most fundamental duty. When 59 percent believe something like the Holocaust could happen again, ignorance becomes not merely academic failure but civilizational peril.
Students must learn that “Never Again” is not a slogan but a promise — one that requires the vigilance that comes only from knowledge, not the activism that comes from ignorance. Without such grounding, universities will continue producing figures like Mamdani: absolutely confident in their moral superiority, completely ignorant of their historical blindness.
Mamdani did not emerge from a vacuum. He represents what happens when prestigious institutions shape young minds without anchoring them in historical truth. His rise should terrify us not because he is uniquely dangerous, but because he is so perfectly typical of what our educational system now produces.
In the end, ignorance is not bliss. It is dangerous. And in the hands of the educated, it becomes lethal.
