Get In The Van, Islamist Grad Students
Send them to CECOT
As part of Trump’s efforts to deport various illegal aliens, several foreign grad students have had their visas revoked for campus Islamist activism. As the American apparat mounts a defense of their constitutional rights to continue living in America, Trump’s ICE is engaging in bureaucratic defensive warfare, shuffling them around various detention centers in preparation for sending them back where they came from (inshallah). Curtis Yarvin, whom you should all be reading, has published a long, convoluted article on why this is a bad move: these people are basically indistinguishable from regular subversive American grad students, this sort of thing pisses off the universities without really injuring them, what you should actually be doing is [PAYWALL].
Well, I disagree. Deporting these people is a good start, like the joke about ten thousand lawyers at the bottom of the sea.
After my decade in the US Army, right in the middle of the 20 year long Global War on Terror, I headed back to college. I had planned to go back to work for the pointier bits of the US government in its global efforts to defeat the people who were trying to kill us. I was a high school student in New York City when Muslim terrorists attempted to blow up a train station through which I and my mother passed daily. A few years later, they blew up the World Trade Center, a few blocks from my old high school. I viewed America as being at war with a hostile Islamist population which saw the American secular global empire as fundamentally incompatible with Islam and which would continue to try to kill Americans such as ourselves.
One of the things that impressed me at the university was that the quad was full of hijabs, kufis, Salafi beards and so forth. There was a large and thriving Muslim Students Association. I was in class with many of these people, and noticed that their politics were basically those of the Muslim Brotherhood. They weren’t quite ready to take over university buildings and harass and assault Jewish students-that would come a decade later-but it was obviously cooking.
“Self,” I said to myself, “if the US government and universities are working so hard to bring legions of these people over here, why should you go over to where they’re from, to fight them over there? Is that worth losing your legs or your life?” You could say that this was a turning point in my career trajectory.
What’s academia for, even?
Ignoring the engineering departments and various other nerd trade schools, what’s the function of academia? In theory, it’s to maintain and continually increase the sum of human knowledge. Scholars dedicate their lives to uncovering heretofore unknown truths and bringing them to the awareness of humanity at large, which can then benefit from them. Like oil, knowledge is a substance lying dormant and inaccessible until intrepid humans make it available to the rest of us through their noble efforts. Scholars advance their careers by doing research and publishing it in peer-reviewed journals and books. Like exploratory drilling, the process has many false starts and failed attempts, but ultimately we are all better off for it. That’s why the government subsidizes universities, directly and through tax exemptions for their endowments-it’s an investment into humanity as a whole.
Does this description really resemble academia outside the hard sciences? No. Many academics spend their working lives emitting complete degenerate gibberish.
Many others spend their careers studying the development of the diphthong in Middle Persian, the divide between the analytic and continental philosophic traditions, the economy of the medieval yak trade in the Wakhan Plateau and other similarly useless and obscure topics. Nobody reads their work voluntarily; nobody benefits by it, or can benefit by it. Most of their output is purposely unreadable. They spend decades in poverty, fighting tooth and nail to have their work peer reviewed and published in a degenerate, Kafkaesque process.
The winners of this process are those who are the best at procedural manipulation-read, petty politics. They gain employment, tenure, rank, all of which can all be stripped away for saying the wrong thing or even being the target of spurious allegations. The majority end up saddled with student debt, working for the government either directly or through an NGO cutout. Some become effectively unemployable. Most have few or no children.
In short, academia ingests people with above average IQ and conscientiousness, sucks up what should be the most productive years of their lives and outputs hordes of sad, sterile, resentful striver grinds who are not only incapable of producing anything anyone would willingly pay money for but actually see this as a degrading process beneath themselves.
Wait, it gets worse!
There are cases where academic output is not unreadable and irrelevant, but worse. A major function of academia is to provide cover for and drive policy. Academic work often serves as propaganda targeting the intellectual classes. Occasionally, this happens directly.
More often, politically useful academic output serves as a point of reference for journalists, legislators, judges and so on.
Another channel by which academia drives policy in the long term is direct indoctrination. Most white collar professions require an academic degree for advancement. Academics teach elective classes to students, who mostly lack a background in the subject matter. The framing of their opinion on the subject is largely determined in these classes. This is why senior IDF officers often have political views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict which are indistinguishable from those of the leftist professors at Haifa University where they studied for their mandatory degrees.
Finally, academics and grad students participate in political conflict directly. They’ve got plenty of time and resentment, and organizing and participating in demonstrations and organizations which fit their academic superiors biases can help significantly in their promotion. Remember, academia is a zero-sum game of office politics; passionately espousing the causes with which your tenure committee identifies is a good move.
In short, academia is a key part of Yarvin’s Cathedral. Academics drive government policy with no responsibility for its outcomes whatsoever. This system has two failure modes. First, giving indirect political power to frustrated academic nebbishes, cat ladies and the rest of the university freak show creates a moral hazard; they often promote causes hostile to civilized humanity out of a general sadistic resentment as well as for status signaling striver reasons. Second, it invites hostile external players to hack the system.
The grad students being deported are best viewed as enemy operatives trying to influence key nodes in the American system of governance, in order to drive long term US policy in a direction convenient to Islamism. This is not wild-eyed McCarthyism: the US recently spent a decade supporting various Islamist movements and states in the Middle East, in large part due to the academic backgrounds of key members of the US government. In the short term, their goal was to terrorize Jewish students and faculty in American universities. At least one of them is an agent of a foreign government.
The American academic system which these people infiltrated is inherently evil and corrupt. It can not be reformed, but should be abolished and replaced with a better one. That’s a serious project which will take a long time. In the meantime, academia’s use as a platform for the hacking of American policy should be minimized. That minimization involves neutralizing the people doing the hacking. Making examples of a few of the ones who don’t have American citizenship and live as guests of the US while subverting the American state, is a good thing; hopefully, it will encourage their colleagues to leave. If nothing else, it will prevent American university campuses from being taken over by hostile terrorist sympathizers.
Frankly I see a blanket ban on foreign students would be a huge win. No more foreign spies and agitators, deprives (worthless and often counterproductive) academia of a vast funding source.
There was an old argument that foreign students would learn to love America, and would stay and improve the country. Those days are long gone.
Deporting Hamasniks essential for disrupting the Colour Revolution that the Democrats are rolling out. But it is only a first step.
The willingness of the Left to work with the Muslim Brotherhood and PFLP etc indicate that things are likely to get very nasty in the foreseeable future. No sane political actor in either East or West has any illusions about these types. Presumably the powers that be pulling the strings plan on mayhem.
This all echoes the last days of the USSR when the KGB in Azerbaijan sponsored anti-Armenian pogroms in Baku.
Thankfully America still has a solid core of mentally and morally functioning people, as we can see from the vote for Trump.