President Trump demanded simple actions from Columbia University to recoup the $400 million in federal grants that he had rescinded, actions which amounted to taking active steps to protect Jewish students on campus.

The university president, Katrina Armstrong, desperate to secure wheelbarrows of taxpayer cash, gave lip service to complying even as she winked at the school’s radical professors, all but begging them to help her play possum. They refused and she resigned.

As easy as the demands sounded, this was mission impossible for Armstrong. Almost all her faculty members are radicals by any reasonable definition. There was zero chance they would ever take any real steps to protect any students from the mobs they incite. Those mobs are their fellow ideological travelers and their pride and joy.

Most Americans don’t realize just how evil our universities have become. Columbia is not an outlier. Almost every university is loaded with radical professors who view their mission as not to educate, but to radicalize their students.

As a general rule, the lower the acceptance rate at the school, the more radical the faculty, making the Ivy League schools some of the worst. But even Nobodyeverheardofus University in a random small town suffers from the same disease.

There was a funny moment during the recent hearing on defunding PBS and NPR when the NPR CEO, Katherine Maher, channeled Captain Renault from Casablanca, and feigned shock to learn that all 87 people at NPR on the editorial board are registered Democrats.

As bad as that is, it is far worse at universities. Nearly 100 percent of professors aren’t just run of the mill Democrats but are full-throated radicals, although the line of separation between them is admittedly rather grey. While the disease was once mostly localized in the liberal arts departments, it has branched out to infect all the departments.

Colleges and universities have become America’s equivalent of Saudi-funded Wahhabi Madrassas and the role they played (and continue to play) in radicalizing Muslim populations around the world.

Somewhere around the start of the new millennium, universities fully embraced postmodernism and its many “ism” cousins, to include Marxism. The more radical, the better.

The foreign students whom these schools imported for their money easily hijacked this leftist system to promote their evil ideologies, which created the marriage of convenience between the left and Islam that has become prominent on so many college campuses. This is how you end up with Queers for Palestine, when if their proponents actually visited Gaza, they’d be lucky if they weren’t just thrown off a building.

I feel a sense of sadness when proud parents brag on their child getting into an elite school, since odds are that the child will be all but unknowable to those parents in four years. They will likely come home more foolish and less empathetic at a minimum and may just think that an assassin who killed a healthcare CEO is a national hero or that it’s a grand idea to key somebody else’s car.

Understanding what our universities have become is key to understanding many of the pathologies that so many Americans find bewildering. It’s also the key to understanding why all institutions appear to be going insane.

What do the teacher leading a bewildered young Johnny in his woke ABCs, leftist judges convinced they are more powerful than the president, politicians fighting to ensure that men get to toss women around like rag dolls on sports fields, and those 87 Democrat journalists at NPR have in common? Every single one of them marinated in universities and, I’d hazard a guess, came out far more radical than when they went in. It’s the source of our national disease… our patient zero.

I watched it play out in the military during my career. When I graduated from the Air Force Academy in the 1990s, nearly all the students were conservative and highly patriotic. My first presidential election was 1992. I knew one person who admitted to voting for Bill Clinton, who was decidedly more moderate than today’s Democrats.

So, what happened to turn these young patriots into the leftist generals we often see? When I attended the Naval Postgraduate Degree, I saw how quickly traditional thinking military officers embraced the radicalism of their professors. Propaganda often works, especially when paired with appeals to vanity. Military officers are required to collect a master’s degree for promotion. In other words, they are sent to indoctrination factories as a requirement for advancement. Note to Secretary Hegseth… end this requirement, please.

I was disheartened to peek into a Facebook group this week of my USAFA classmates in which many of them were openly attacking Elon Musk in the worst possible language after someone posted a picture of him wearing a USAFA jacket. The insane level of vitriol was astonishing, even as some of the more sober members were pushing back. I know many of these guys, but it was as if their brains melted. That’s the effect of higher education.

This week, Senator Mike Lee tweeted out the question, “When did Dems become the party of violence?” Leaving aside the fact that anyone paying an iota of attention knows that the Democrats always been a party that embraces violence to one degree or another, the question still stands since the full-throated and nonapologetic embrace of violence today is a little different.

Americans are mystified by this, since they haven’t sat through the typical college liberal arts class, where violence-embracing ideologies are the norm.

There are a few actions Republicans can and are taking in response. One of these actions is to cut federal funding for academia. The idea that a private elite university like Columbia should collect $400 million in taxpayer funding is absurd. Leaving aside the fact that it’s elitist and regressive to the core, we are funding these universities to train future generations to hate America. No private college should get a penny of taxpayer money at this point. Colleges like Hillsdale and Grove City thrive without federal funding and their students are far better for it.

Congress should also tax college endowments. The fact that universities shelter billions of dollars that they use to grow their own influence at the expense of their students is reason enough. But, that stream of money enables them to more effectively sow their poison. This will be challenging since Democrats will fight to defend these universities, which are key to their political power.

A superb action the administration is taking is to deny visas to foreign students who are likely to instill more radicalism into the schools. Colleges love foreign students, since they are often paying full tuition and helping fund their existence. They’d far rather bring in a radical from Gaza or a PRC-funded student from China than a poor American from the heartland whom they’ve slandered as coming from privilege. Marco Rubio indicated the administration revoked more than three hundred student visas at this point. That’s a great start.

Republicans also need to continue to champion alternatives, like what Governor Ron DeSantis did when he converted a leftist indoctrination center into New College in Florida. They can also push trade schools that provide practical and needed skills.

This is the most important battle line. None of the other problems can be solved until this battle is won since these universities will continue to churn out radical foot soldiers. Columbia has shown that these universities can’t be saved. Republicans should do all in their power to put them out of business.

Image: Ted Eytan