On Friday, November 10th, I had the honor of attending Bari Weiss’s lecture at the Federalist Society’s National Lawyers Convention. The lecture was given in honor of Barbara K. Olson, a conservative legal commentator who was murdered by Al-Qaeda terrorists on 9/11. Weiss, former New York Times opinion editor and founder of The Free Press, forcefully condemned the evil that took Olson’s life and continues to threaten our world today. Jihadi terror, an attack on all Western civilization’s achievements, revealed its barbarity in the shocking form of 9/11 and once again on October 7, when more Jews were brutally killed than on any day since the Holocaust. Weiss charged her listeners to stand with the Jews, to stand with Israel, to stand with America, and, most of all, to stand with civilization against the mobs seeking to dismantle it in their wave of slaughter.
Beyond her general call to moral clarity, her powerful message (which I encourage you to listen to in its entirety starting around 18:15 here or transcribed here) brought forward an insight that is particularly relevant to Princetonians: that many of our allegedly well-educated peers are standing with civilization’s enemies.
Before I elaborate, I must be morally explicit, as Weiss was with the audience on November 10. When terrorists rape and slaughter innocent women and children, it is evil and a profound threat to everything I value in our civilization. When terrorists tie families together and burn them, it is unconscionable barbarism. When terrorists use the phones of their victims to broadcast their savagery to victims’ families, they display inhuman depravity. When terrorists behead infants, it is an unfathomable abomination.
In perpetrating these unthinkable acts and more, Hamas has waged war not only on Israel and the Jewish people but on civilization itself. Regardless of any position or political disagreement internal to our civilization, an inability to stand clearly against an evil confronting our civilization’s foundation shows not only a lack of intellectual power or moral reasoning (both of which, certainly, are evident) but a basic problem in one’s formation as a human being.
Unfortunately, too many Princeton students have proven their lack of moral clarity and not only failed to stand against evil but instead have denounced Israel’s attempts at deterrence and civilian security, and in some cases, actively sided with evil. The day before Weiss’s lecture, marchers on Princeton’s campus chanted, “We don’t want two-state [solution], we want ‘48,” demanding the elimination of the state of Israel, founded in 1948; “From Princeton to Gaza, Globalize the Intifada,” referencing organized mass attacks on Jews in Israel; and “Resistance is justified when people are occupied,” endorsing the only recent act of “resistance” by Palestinians: the October 7 massacre. And these sentiments did not just arise in reaction to assessments (albeit muddled and misinformed, but that is beside the point) of Israel’s efforts to rescue hostages and end Hamas’s ability to wage war on innocent civilians. The day of and after the massacre, Princeton students shared posts praising the attacks as “decolonization” finally becoming “a tangible event” and as a justified fight for “freedom.” These posts have continued over the past two months, with many students expressing support for Palestinians’ “right to resist” and belittling the large-scale murder of Jews by placing the word massacre in quotation marks.
What would lead ostensibly sophisticated, highly privileged students to laud monstrous villainy waged against the very civilization from which they benefit so much? Weiss, citing—among other universities—Princeton, blames radical left, antiliberal ideologies like decolonization and postmodernism. She once saw these ideas as nothing more than seminar-room banter but now fears the intellectual, moral, and social rot they have produced. I would agree and go even further: decolonization, relativism, and reflexive anti-Americanism are simply evil.
Decolonization is the reenactment of historical grievances against innocent descendants in an exercise of primitive collective punishment and revenge. Relativism collapses the distinction between good and evil, refusing to judge immoral cultural norms and individual actions as the violations of human dignity they are. Anti-Americanism has taught students to hate their benefactors; instead of accepting the imperfect but ever-reforming American project, they turn to evil ideologues promising utopia. Together, these ideologies mean “liberation” from what makes our civilization good, from the institutions and moral norms that have made for unprecedented human flourishing. As an extension, they produce unfathomable hatred for the one Western-style liberal democracy in the Middle East.
Weiss gave her speech before the chief annual gathering of the conservative legal movement. Her message should have resonated with that movement’s deepest values – and it did. The conservative movement seeks to preserve the order we have achieved in our civilization, specifically in its legal norms, structures, and proscriptions. An attack on civilization like the world saw on October 7 endangers the movement’s most fundamental commitments. The packed Mayflower Hotel ballroom, which gave Weiss a standing ovation lasting several minutes, seems to have recognized this point.
Academia, too, should wholeheartedly adopt, or at the very least anticipate, her argument. Analogous to the conservative legal movement, it seeks to understand and transmit our civilization’s accomplishments, if intellectual rather than legal. Here at Princeton, we should be tracing our evolving recognition of “the unseen things that do not die” and our civilization’s academic, aesthetic, and moral achievements. An attack on all of our fundamental principles, expressed through sub-moral, rapacious brutality, should receive our strongest condemnation as a threat not only to our physical safety but to our very project and purpose. We will not revert to a civilization where rape is resistance and infanticide is justified. If modern elite universities cannot maintain this most basic principle, can and should they even remain a worthwhile part of our civilization?
(The Federalist Society/Screenshot via YouTube)
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