Note: This column first appeared on Cashill’s substack.
Authorities are beginning to recognize a phenomenon I have been documenting for years, namely the threat to Democracy posed by ELFs – Educated Liberal Females. During the George Floyd riots, ELFs comprised the clear majority of protesters, but males dominated the shock troops, the ones willing to confront the police and risk arrest.
A Fox News headline from Friday suggests our historically docile ELFs may be juicing up on steroids: “Mostly women arrested in Columbia University library takeover: NYPD.” As Fox reported, “In total, the NYPD made 80 arrests – 19 males and 61 females, according to a source. A source also said at least 50 of the 80 protesters arrested were Columbia University students.”
According to witnesses, the protesters climbed on desks and chanted “Free Palestine.” They renamed – at least for one brief whiny moment – the Butler Library “Basel Al-Araj Popular University” and demanded that Columbia University divest from Israel. In the course of storming building, they injured two campus police and two NYPD officers.
While marauding through the library, protesters handed out booklets telling bewildered students about the eponymous Mr. Al-Araj, whose first name they unwittingly Anglicized into “Basil.” The soulful Al-Araj emerged as an “intellectual martyr” in 2017 after being killed in a two-hour gunfight with an Israeli police force. He had previously been arrested by the Palestinian Authority for possessing unlicensed weapons and planning military attacks against Israel.
“Somebody hung up a flag, posters, stickers, people were scribbling on the walls, dancing on the tables, singing. … Chanting like, I don’t know, ‘Free Palestine,’ the classics,” said one student disgusted by the display. And although the international students arrested will have their visas revoked, the America students, likely the majority, will get to replay the “classics” at some future protest against some future injustice, more imagined than real.
Ivy trained women seem particularly vulnerable to this terrorist cosplay by dint of their prestigious education. It imbues them with arrogance without benefit of any countervailing wisdom. Students in the liberal arts and social sciences, the fields most women favor, will pass through multiple years of academe without ever encountering a conservative professor, perhaps not even a contrary thought.
A study of faculty voter registration at 40 leading U.S. universities, for instance, showed a more than ten-to-one ratio of Democrats to Republicans with the numbers skewing higher in liberal arts and among young faculty. In some fields, there are no Republicans at all.
As females, ELFs are being groomed by educators and the media to think of themselves as victims, as “marginalized,” even as oppressed. In a world without children, movement leaders exploit the ELF’s innate nurturing instincts and turn it to the care and feeding of surrogate beaus. Every week seems to produce a new romatic hero: cold-blooded killer Luigi Mangione, wife beater Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and now gunfighter Bassell – Bassel? Basil? – Al-Araj.
Anticipating heat from the Trump White House, acting Columbia President Clair Shipman defied the ELF stereotype and got tough, certainly by Ivy League standards. She called in the NYPD and had agitators arrested. “Disruptions to our academic activities will not be tolerated and are violations of our rules and policies,” said Shipman. “Columbia strongly condemns violence on our campus, antisemitism and all forms of hate and discrimination, some of which we witnessed today.”
Shipman, a veteran TV journalist and D.C. insider – she had been married to Obama press secretary Jay Carney – had been on the job for only about six weeks when the campus exploded. The Trump White House praised Shipman for having “met the moment with fortitude and conviction.”
In addition to the arrests, scores of Columbia students have been suspended. As a condition of reinstatement, Shipman should require these jihadist wannabes to read Douglas Murray’s chilling best seller, “On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization.” The Western world has not produced a cult as deeply evil as Hamas in centuries.
In their quest to “save democracy,” ELFs inevitably sign up for death cults like Hamas or Planned Parenthood or the Democrat Party. In the 1940 film “The Ghost Breakers,” Bob Hope concisely sums up the phenomenon that Belgian psychologist Dr. Mattias Desmet calls “mass formation psychosis.”
Writes Desmet in his surprise bestseller, “The Psychology of Totalitarianism,” “It is, in essence. a kind of group hypnosis that destroys individuals’ ethical self-awareness and robs them of their ability to think critically.”
Desmet may have taken his cue from “The Ghost Breakers.” “A zombie has no will of his own,” a psychologist tells the Bob Hope character. “You see them sometimes walking around blindly with dead eyes, following orders, not knowing what they do, and not caring.”
Quips Hope, “You mean like Democrats.” Exactly.
Note: This column first appeared on Cashill’s substack. Please subscribe.