Like every normal (as in “not leftist”) Jewish person, fear of another Holocaust exists in every cell of my body. They say that psychic trauma can be handed down through DNA, and I don’t doubt it. In the case of the Holocaust (and the millennia of pogroms and Jewish massacres that came before), Jews worry...a lot and always. Those who are philosemitic and who have been paying attention to the antisemitism sweeping academia want to help. But the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which purports to define antisemitism and that just passed in the House, is wrong. The federal government should never be in the business of defining and “grading” ideas.

The bill, which Rep. Michael Lawler (who is not Jewish) sponsored, “defines” antisemitism to help with enforcing existing anti-discrimination laws:

To provide for the consideration of a definition of antisemitism set forth by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance for the enforcement of Federal antidiscrimination laws concerning education programs or activities, and for other purposes.

In a way, it’s great to see Congress stepping up and doing something that it would normally just hand over to the Deep State (i.e., the administrative division of the Executive Branch). One of my primary complaints about the Deep State is that it has, with a lazy Congress’s complicity, usurped Congress’s unique legislative function.

Unlike Congress, the administrative state has no loyalty to the people because it’s not elected. It’s loyal only to the party that keeps its paychecks and power intact, and, since President Wilson, that’s been the Democrat party. It is a wholly unconstitutional state of affairs.

You can also see that the Act is trying to respond to a genuine problem. When it comes to both non-violent and violent crimes tied to religion in America, antisemitism always tops the list. It’s also been rising for years, with a sharp increase since October 7, especially on college campuses.

Moreover, when you go to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Working Definition of Antisemitism, which is incorporated by reference into the bill, you’ll see that it’s a fairly good and comprehensive definition. If you’re going to have a definition for antisemitic “hate crimes,” this one is as good as any other.

The problem, then, isn’t with the bill’s intentions or the definition on which it relies. The problem is more profound: The government should not be in the business of defining ideas or outlawing them. The government should be banning actions that are illegal, not thoughts that it doesn’t like. The former is within the purview of all governments; the latter is within the purview of dictators and has no place in a country with a First Amendment.

I started this essay by noting my inordinate, ingrained fear of another Holocaust. Everyone should fear that. And we all know that, whether in Nazi Germany or 1994 Rwanda or ISIS-controlled Iraq, bad ideas if given a running start, will morph into violent, deadly action. The thing is, though, that these bad ideas, beginning in their early stages, are always preceded by obvious and illegal bad acts.

For example, in the lead-up to the violent campus occupations we’re now seeing, both college administrators and elected officials have been giving a pass to the illegal acts that paired with the antisemitic rhetoric, acts such as low-level property destruction, low-level assaults (e.g., grabbing flags, pushing at cameras), and overt threats of violence. All of these are garden-variety criminal acts. They could have been dealt with swiftly and punitively.

One could also argue that they go beyond street-level violence. Instead, what’s been happening on American streets and campuses constitutes acts of domestic terrorism that seek to use violence to “influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion.” In America, we use the voting booth, not the jackboot, to change our political direction. Anything else must, again, be dealt with swiftly and punitively.

Additionally, without getting into the minutiae of antisemitism, to the extent that they protected people preventing Jewish students and faculty from safe access to their institutions, the administrators and elected officials conspired to interfere with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. Every one of them could have been prosecuted. (And no, it doesn’t matter that some of these colleges are private. All of them, directly or indirectly, take in vast amounts of federal money, if only through student loans and grants.)

What’s happened on college campuses is the equivalent of the broken window theory of policing: If you don’t immediately stop visible low-level criminal activity, you will inevitably get more damaging high-level criminal activity. Indeed, just in the past week, when high-level criminal activity broke out on campuses across America, administrators and elected officials still tried to do nothing.

The same broken windows theory applies to DEI. It seems innocuous—righting historical wrongs—but it gave permission to institutions to discriminate. Once that permission is granted, there’s no stopping its growth. Merit should be the only metric, without regard to race, color, creed, etc. That’s how you stop bad ideas from taking root in America.

I sincerely hope that the Senate stops the bill dead. We all know that the way to fight bad ideas is with good ideas, but the bottom line is the same: Congress should not be making the ideas. Instead, it should erase every law and regulation that gives benefits to or imposes burdens upon people based on race, creed, sex, etc., and it should leave the realm of ideas alone.

Image by AI showing how ideas should be debated in America.