Thread by @RadioFreeTom

For years I've watched college kids latch on to one cause after another. Later, they grow up and rethink some of those causes.
This is different: Many are making a decision to become vicious antisemites, as if this is something you can later dismiss as youthful enthusiasm. /1

https://twitter.com/jentaub/status/1722946093728575571

I knew kids who protested, say, nuclear power 40+ years ago who now, in late middle age, probably agreed with leaders like Obama that maybe nuke plants are okay. So you can walk back your fun stories of getting maced at Seabrook and say, "yeah, maybe I was wrong."

Not this. /2

You march on a campus spewing hatred of Jews, it will change you. And you're going to carry that stain with you for the rest of your life. It's not a youthful dalliance to make common cause with terrorists. It's an ancient hatred that will infest you and try to hold you. /3

I understand that part of being in college is the burning desire to feel part of something important. Been happening for decades, for many causes, some good, some bad, some stupid. But this is pure evil, and you can't just backspace it out of your resume later. /4

Irony: Campus antisemitism is pure privilege. It's a yearning to be relevant and part of A Great Cause by identifying with an oppressed group as a way of mitigating the reality that you're on an elite campus living a beautifully cosseted life. /5

I've been watching all this, and having spent my life in and around colleges, I'm sickened. I wish my former colleagues in the academy would speak up more. Some are, but many are part of the problem.
They can afford to be. To be a professor is a privilege, in every sense. /6

I can only hope that young people are more sensible than some of the faculty. In my experience, most of them are. (No matter what right-wingers think, it's hard to indoctrinate kids: they're mostly pretty smart.) But this is a dark path and it has few off-ramps. /7x