Talk about burying the lede.

Sort-of conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat issued what might have been a useful column, What Students Read Before They Protest, about the reasons why students at Columbia and other “elite” educational institutions are demonstrating in favor of Hamas, terrorism, anti-Semitism, and wiping Israel off the face of the earth. But Douthat, who can write clearly and forcefully when he wants to (or, I suppose, when his woke and biased editors let him) instead buries his own objective in foggy rhetoric, Authentic Frontier Gibberish and equivocation to such an extent that 1) few will have the patience to read it and 2) the importance of his point is diluted and lost.

This is how Jonathan Turley used to write until he was red-pilled.

Deciphered, here is what Douthat wants to say, but doesn’t have the guts to do so clearly: The outbreak of anti-Jew, anti-Isreal, pro-Hamas demonstrations on college campuses is the direct and predictable result of these institutions becoming anti-America, anti-white and pro-Marxist indoctrination centers instead of actual institutions of higher learning. He proves that point quite well, but buries the compelled conclusion.

To begin with, it takes him nearly 500 words—I counted—to get to the crux of his evidence. After citing the Columbia “core curriculum” in “Contemporary Civilization,”which begins with the standard “Great Books” and traditional scholars like Plato, Hobbes and Jefferson, Douthat reveals that,

… then comes the 20th century, and suddenly the ambit narrows to progressive preoccupations and only those preoccupations: anticolonialism, sex and gender, antiracism, climate. Frantz Fanon and Michel Foucault. Barbara Fields and the Combahee River Collective. Meditations on the trans-Atlantic slave trade and how climate change is “colonial déjà vu”…To engage with the contemporary world, the world they are being prepared to influence and lead, they read texts that are only really important to understanding the perspective of the contemporary left”…

This has two effects, one general and one specific to the current protests at Columbia. The first effect is a dramatic intellectual and historical narrowing. In the Columbia curriculum’s 20th-century readings, the age of totalitarianism simply evanesces, leaving decolonization as the only major political drama of the recent past. There is no Orwell, no Solzhenitsyn; Hannah Arendt’s essays on the Vietnam War and student protests in America are assigned, but not “The Origins of Totalitarianism” or “Eichmann in Jerusalem.” Absent, too, are any readings that would shed light on the ideas that the contemporary left is ranged against: There is no neoconservatism, certainly no religious conservatism, but also nothing that would make sense of neoliberalism in all its variations…

This narrowing, in turn, leaves students with an equally narrow list of outlets for the world-changing energy that they’re constantly exhorted to embrace. Conservatism of any sort is naturally off limits. A center-left stewardship seems like selling out. There’s no clear path to engagement with many key dramas of our time — renewed civilizational competition, the stresses of digital existence, existential anomie. Climate change looms over everything, but climate activism is expected be merged somehow with anticolonial and antiracist action….But if you’re willing to simplify and flatten history — 20th-century history especially — it is easier to make these preoccupations fit Israel-Palestine….Israel gets to be the singular scapegoat for the sins of defunct European empires and white-supremacist regimes.

What’s “vindicate its searching-for-an-endgame strategy in Gaza” supposed to mean, and why does it need excusing? The endgame is destroying Hamas and doing whatever is necessary to accomplish that, and to win the war which the Gazan-elected government of terrorists that the student fascists are cheering on started. And student protesters should be treated exactly as protesters would be in they chanted racist ditties or demanded that women be sent back to the kitchen and kept barefoot and pregnant. The reason similarly threatening and dehumanizing protests against Jews are enabled at Columbia, Yale, Cornell , Harvard and the others is because the school’s administrators have revealed their own agendas by the very curriculum choices Douthat just revealed. Why won’t he say that?

Instead he descends into deliberately obtuse rhetoric featuring words like “recrudescence.”