Best Of: Ivy League Is Paving The Road To Hell | Bobby Burack

This column originally aired on October 19. We are re-running as part of our Thanksgiving Best Of.

Economist Thomas Sowell once said, "The road to hell is paved with Ivy League degrees.” I believe him. I've always believed that. Now, the rest of the country might believe him too.

A sense of evil has disseminated across elite campuses since October 7, the day Hamas organized a coordinated offensive on southern Israel by massacring 260 civilians at a music festival.

Hamas presented us with the worst of humanity — the slaughtering of the innocent, the abduction of women, and the beheading of civilians. Yet various student bodies responded to the acts of terrorism by supporting them.

You've seen the demonstrations across social media and cable news.

Notably, Harvard students signed a letter blaming Israeli victims for the ensuing violence in Gaza.

Students at Columbia walked around campus carrying Palestinian flags, chanting, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free," code for “wipe Israel from the map.”

A professor at Columbia called the Hamas attack "awesome."

At Cornell, a lecturer cherished the death of Jews as an "exhilarating" and "energizing" exhibition. He claimed the attacks shifted the balance of politics and punctured Israel's illusion of invincibility.

Other elite, if not Ivy, institutions of higher learning followed suit.

Students and professors ripped down the posters of missing Israelis around the New York University campus. A rally at UNC-Chapel Hill broke out in chants of "We are Hamas! F--k your mother."

By organizing the largest one-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, Hamas turned elite U.S. universities into its most visible champions.

These rallies have appalled outsiders. Americans cannot believe our most prestigious universities would support such unspeakable, insidious atrocities.

Thomas Sowell can.

Concerns about the political radicalism of Ivy-trained students are not exactly new. Journalist Evan Mandery, who graduated from Harvard, recorded the adverse effects of an Ivy education in a book titled "Poison Ivy." Magazine editor R. R. Reno released an essay in 2021 explaining that he stopped hiring Ivy League graduates because they enter the workforce "damaged" and deprived of common sense.

But society at large has never shared the same apprehensions as Sowell, Mandery, and Reno. Americans are groomed to admire and defer to those who come from elite institutions.

The relationship between Ivy grads and the rest of society is meant to be idolatrous.

Ivy universities have long been a farm system for the cultural elite. Harvard diplomas are plastered across the walls of offices in Washington and on Wall Street, offices that regularly make decisions about your life.

Though abhorrent to see elite students back Hamas, there's a profound silver lining in their pro-terrorist activism: they've unwittingly unmasked themselves.

For two weeks, factions of prestigious universities have told the rest of society who they are, removing the illusion they are the most capable people to lead the country.

Lisa Boothe, a Fox News contributor, hosts an iHeart podcast on which she holds those in power accountable. She has been covering the war in Israel and detailed to OutKick what the past weeks say about our years of treating Ivy diplomas as a ticket to elite status:

"We're screwed. The future 'leaders' of America are terrorist sympathizers. Imagine future lawyers, doctors, and politicians who cheer on the beheading of babies, the murder of the elderly, and the raping of innocent women. These people are a disgrace to humanity.”

Well said.

The cheerleading of Hamas sprung from the same belief that led college campuses to endorse BLM protestors in 2020. The supposedly intellectually superior are taught to view the globe through the lens of identity, to strip civilization down into two groups: the oppressed and the oppressors.

Or, in the case of the Israeli-Hamas conflict, the "colonizers” and the “colonized.”

A Stanford professor underscored that process last week when he reportedly asked each student in his classroom to announce where their ancestors were from so that he could classify them into one of the two buckets.

“He asked how many Jews died in the Holocaust,” said a student. When someone said 6 million, “he said, ‘Yes. Only 6 million.’”

The professor is an anti-Semite who maintains that dirty Jews deserve to face violent consequences in the name of decolonization. We are learning that viewpoint is quite common among university professors.

According to Barton Swaim of the Wall Street Journal, this radical indoctrination produces college graduates who, wrought with either feelings of guilt or oppression, leave campus short on true geopolitical understanding but long on self-righteousness:

"The vast preponderance of the anti-Israel students at Harvard, Stanford and other elite campuses are the products of privileged and well-connected upbringings. ... heir use of electric cars and belief in the right progressive causes expiate their guilt, and anyway it’s far easier to accuse others."

That purview prompted a new generation of Marxists on campus.

"For modern progressive academics, weaned on the Marxian concept that wealth is the result of exploitation, that is precisely the reason for Israel’s guilt. They can’t behold its prosperity without concluding that the Jews have stolen their wealth from their neighbors," adds Swaim.

That explains why elite-educated students would support a barbaric response to the formation of Western civilization.

Consider for a moment what that says about their view of our country and its history.

Harvard students released an unhinged statement in reaction to the Hamas terrorist attack in Israel. It blamed the Israelis. (Credit: Getty Images)

But, while the unmasking of elite college campuses should be as enduring as it is disheartening. The consequences could be substantial.

Already, notable Jewish donors have severed ties with Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, promising to end their sizable contributions. The on-campus demonstrations revealed to them that they had been subsidizing Jewish hatred.

Harvard president Claudine Gay responded to the donors with a statement supporting how the "university embraces a commitment to free expression."

Her statement is surely to backfire. More conservative-minded students can use Harvard's newfound respect for free speech -- after earning a score for the worst school for free speech just last month — as leverage against cancellation and further indoctrination.

In addition, future students who are more free-minded may now think twice before subjecting themselves to Ivy League campuses that are wrought with political and moral filth.

Republican lawmakers have called for universities to expel the students who participated in the pro-Hamas rallies. But there's no need to punish them for their speech. Nor is there a need to browbeat them into an inauthentic apology.

The answer to hate speech is not less speech. As always, the answer to hate speech is more speech.

Stifling radicals ultimately benefits them because it forces them to conceal their intentions. Terrorist sympathizers are most effective when they can hide beneath the surface.

Let the morally compromised reveal themselves.

As Kevin Spacey warned us in "The Usual Suspects": “The greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing the world that he did not exist.”

If those students are indeed our future, and we aren't calling for them to be forever blacklisted, we ought to know that they exist and allow them to expose to us exactly what they are coded to believe.

The last week demonstrates how elite college campuses programmed students to be sinful, amoral socialites who are mentally weak enough to fall prey to the whims of Islamic nationalism.

The pro-Hamas student rallies spotlighted the blueprint to hell that Thomas Sowell warned about. Fortunately, everyone now sees it.