A research unit affiliated with the science quarterly Skeptic confirms a correlation between higher education and support for political violence among Americans.
Only 18 per cent of those with a high-school diploma or less agree with the proposal “If you are protesting something unjust, it is reasonable to damage property.” But twice as many (36 per cent) of those with graduate or professional degrees think it “reasonable” to damage property in the name of social justice.
This pattern recurs with “Violence is often necessary to create social change.” Only 23 per cent of the low-educated agree with that. Among graduates and professionals, it rises to 40 per cent.
American higher ed teaches that the US, capitalism and Israel share the common evils of injustice, war and racism. You can get this for free on the internet, too. But the internet will not give you a degree certificate and teach you to say you hate “Zionism” rather than Jews.
In mid-April, Jewish student groups at the University of California Los Angeles invited Omer Shem Tov, who survived 505 days as a hostage of Hamas in Gaza, to speak on campus. The student council objected that the university was “complicit in the production or amplification of “one-sided narratives” that might “harm” Arab and Muslim students.
Higher ed inculcates a “permission structure” for political actions. This term first appeared in Barack Obama’s second term, around 2013, when the Obama administration faced a Republican-controlled House and needed to persuade moderate Republicans to break ranks. It was possibly invented by Dan Pfeiffer, Obama’s strategy and communications adviser.
Another Obama adviser, Ben Rhodes, boasted of building a permission structure around the Iran deal by creating a media “echo chamber”. The Iran deal also involved an end-run around Congress. Shifting the permission structure appeals to radicals who lack the numbers.
The permission structures of academic radicalism were created after 1968, when American voters rejected the revolution and voted for Richard Nixon. They became as water is to fish, the invisible medium of campus life, then flooded into public life.
A couple of Skeptic findings will strike a chord among anyone who’s seen footage of a Palestine Action protest in Britain. Liberal Gen Z women are more supportive of political violence than the Trump-friendly men of Gen X and the Boomers. And Boomer white liberals are more likely to endorse political violence than their Gen X children and millennial grandchildren are.
The Skeptic survey found that those most likely to endorse political violence were, as in previous surveys, “younger adults, younger black Americans, men, and political liberals”.
Cole Tomas Allen (pictured), who tried to murder Donald Trump and his cabinet at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, ticks all of these boxes. Allen went beyond endorsement, and was last seen face down on a carpet at the Washington Hilton. Allen holds a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the California Institute of Technology. CalTech likes to call itself the MIT of the West Coast. MIT is also full of political extremists.
As an undergraduate, Allen worked in CalTech’s Nasa’s jet propulsion laboratory. He then took a master’s in computer science. The media like to call would-be assassins “losers”, but Allen had the smarts and credentials of an American winner.
The FBI are now inspecting Allen’s “devices” for clues. The unspoken assumption is that social media accelerated his radicalisation from thought to deed: from imbibing academic theories to committing terrorist acts.
The permission structure is a closed ideological space. It is a means to an ideological end, so all ideas that fall within it are legitimate. Like an Iranian centrifuge or a Zack Polanski speech, it spins high-status opinions into fusion with low-status ones.
Consider, for such are the times, Nika Soon-Shiong. The daughter of the owner of the Los Angeles Times, Soon-Shiong graduated from Stanford University in California, then took a PhD from Oxford in economics and industrial development.
This is as high-status as it gets. Yet Soon-Shiong, now the publisher of the far-left, Hamas-positive Dropsite News website, cannot resist low-status conspiracising.
On April 6, a pro-Iranian X account claimed that American and Israeli planes had bombed the warehouses of the Iranian Pistachio Company near the Iranian city of Rafsanjan.
A day later, an anonymous Substack described the strikes as “likely a gift to Lynne and Stewart Resnick, the Zionist billionaires who own the California-based Wonderful company, the largest producer of pistachios in the world”.
Soon-Shiong seems to agree. In an X post on April 11 that was read by more than a million people, she explained that the Resnicks “stole California’s water supply in a series of secretive meetings”. They donate “millions to the IDF”. Their empire “stands to gain” from the weakening of Iranian pistachio exports.
Last year, Jewish Insider reports, Soon-Shiong claimed that the Resnicks’ influence “underpins the California water crisis, the IDF and the propaganda war against Iran”.
Soon-Shiong isn’t nuts. She cannot be entirely ignorant. She chooses to believe this sort of thing, or pretends to, because the permission structure in which she operates will reward it.
“Zionist oligarch implicated in bombing of Iranian pistachio factories,” the left-conspiracist British site Canary chirped. The Resnicks might want to speak to their lawyers. But the law only goes so far, and the further it stays from regulating speech, the better.
Liberal societies, and Jews especially, overvalue rationality and debate. This disposes us to adopt emollient strategies, or dismiss our enemies’ ideas as merely dumb and false. We forget that the permission structure is not built for consensus or truth.
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