Nato allies believe Russia is running sabotage operations to undermine European support for Ukraine.

When Viktor Orbán gave a speech in 2022 at a Conservative Political Action Conference gathering in Budapest, he shared his secret to amassing power with Donald Trump’s fan base. “We must have our own media,” he told his audience.

As a Hungarian investigative journalist, I have had a firsthand view of how Orbán has built his own media universe while simultaneously placing a stranglehold on the independent press. As I watch from afar what’s happening to the free press in the United States during the first weeks of Trump’s second presidency—the verbal bullying, the legal harassment, the buckling by media owners in the face of threats—it all looks very familiar. The MAGA authorities have learned Orbán’s lessons well.

I saw the roots of Orbán’s media strategy when I first met him for an interview, in 2006. He was in the opposition then but had served as prime minister before and was fighting hard to get back in power. When we met in his office in a hulking century-old building that overlooked the Danube River in Budapest, he was very friendly, even charming. Like Trump, he is the kind of politician who knows how to connect with people when he thinks he has something to gain.

During the interview, his demeanor shifted. I still remember how his face went dark when I pushed on questions that he obviously did not want to answer. It was a tense exchange, but he reverted to his cordial mode when we finished the interview, and I turned off the recorder.

What happened afterwards was less friendly. In Hungary, journalists are expected to send edited interview transcripts to their interviewees. The idea is that if the interviewees think you took something they said out of context, they can ask for changes before publication. But in this case, Orbán’s press team sent back the text with some of his answers entirely deleted and rewritten. When my editors and I told them we wouldn’t accept this, they said they wouldn’t allow the interview to be published.

In the end, we published it without their edits. That was the last time I interviewed Viktor Orbán. And when he returned to power in 2010 after a landslide election victory, he made sure that he would never have to answer uncomfortable questions again.

One of the first pieces of legislation his party introduced was a media law that restructured how the sector is regulated in Hungary. The government set up a new oversight agency and appointed hard-line loyalists to its key positions. This agency later blocked proposed mergers and acquisitions by independent media companies, while issuing friendly rulings for pro-government businesses.

The Orbán government also transformed public broadcasting—which had previously carried news programs challenging politicians from all parties—into a mouthpiece of the state. The service’s newly appointed leaders got rid of principled journalists and replaced them with governing-party sympathizers who could be counted on to toe the line.

Then the government went after private media companies. Origo, a popular Hungarian news website, was one of its first targets. For many years, Origo—where I had been working when I conducted the 2006 Orbán interview—was a great place to do journalism. It was owned by a multinational telecommunications company and run by people who did not interfere with our work. If anything, they were supportive of our journalism. In 2009, after conducting some award-winning investigations, I was even invited to the CEO’s office for a friendly chat about the importance of accountability reporting.

But a few years after Orbán’s return to power, the environment changed. As we continued our aggressive—but fair—reporting, the telecommunications company behind Origo came under pressure from the government. Instead of sending encouraging messages, the outlet’s publisher started telling the editor in chief not to pursue certain stories that were uncomfortable for Orbán and his allies.

My colleagues in the newsroom and I pushed back. But after repeated clashes with the publisher over one of my investigations, into the expensive and mysterious travel of a powerful government official, the editor in chief was forced out of his job. I resigned, along with many fellow journalists, and soon the news site was sold to a company with close links to Orbán’s inner circle. Now Origo is unrecognizable. It has become the flagship news site of the pro-government propaganda machine, publishing articles praising Orbán and viciously attacking his critics.

Origo is part of an ecosystem that includes hundreds of newspapers and news sites, several television channels—including the public broadcasters and one of the two biggest commercial channels—and almost all radio stations. That’s not to mention the group of pro-government influencers whose social-media posts are distributed widely, thanks to financial resources also linked to the government.

This machine is not even pretending to do journalism in the traditional sense. It is not like Fox News, which still has some professional anchors and reporters alongside the openly pro-Trump media personalities who dominate the channel in prime time.

The machine built under Orbán has only one purpose, and it is to serve the interests of the government. There is hardly any autonomy. Editors and reporters get directions from the very top of the regime on what they can and cannot cover. If there is a message that must be delivered, the whole machine jumps into action: Hundreds of outlets will publish the same story with the same headline and same photos.

In 2022, Direkt36, the investigative-reporting center I co-founded after leaving Origo, wrote about one such example. In the story, which was reported by my colleague Zsuzsanna Wirth, we described an episode in which Bertalan Havasi, the prime minister’s press chief at the time, sent an email to the director of the national news agency.

​​“Hi, could you write an article about this, citing me as a source? Thanks!” Havasi wrote. (The instruction was about a relatively mundane matter: a letter that a European rabbi had sent to Orbán thanking him for his support.) Later, Havasi also told the agency what the headline and lead sentence should be. The news agency followed the instructions word for word.

A few years ago, I investigated the pro-government takeover of Index, another of Hungary’s most popular news sites. I obtained a recording in which the outlet’s editor in chief described to one of his employees how Index had received financial backing from a friend of Orbán’s, a former gas fitter who has become Hungary’s richest man thanks to lucrative state contracts. The editor in chief warned that Index had to be careful with news about Orbán’s friend because, without him, “there will be no one who will put money into” the outlet.

Just as Orbán explained in his CPAC speech, this sophisticated propaganda machine has played a crucial role in his ability to stay in power for more than 15 years. When the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, a watchdog group of which the United States is a member, published its report on Hungary’s 2022 parliamentary elections, it pointed to the media as a major weakness in the country’s democratic system.

“The lack of impartial information in the media about the main contestants, the absence of debates among the major electoral competitors, and the independent media’s limited access to public information and activities of national and local government significantly limited voters’ opportunity to make an informed choice,” the election monitors concluded, after a vote that yet again cemented the power of Orbán’s ruling party.

What has happened in Hungary might not happen in the United States. Hungary, a former Eastern Bloc nation that broke free of oppressive Soviet control only three and a half decades ago, has never had such a robust and vibrant independent media scene as the one the U.S. has enjoyed for centuries. But if someone had told me when Orbán returned to power that we would end up with a propaganda machine where the free Hungarian media had once been, with many of the old outlets shut down or transformed into government mouthpieces, I would not have believed it.

And I see ominous signs in the U.S. that feel similar to the early phases of what we experienced here. When I read about the Associated Press being banned from White House events, that reminds me of how my colleagues at Direkt36 have been denied entry to Orbán’s rare press conferences. When I see the Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos cozying up to Trump, that reminds me of how big corporations and their wealthy executives, including the owner of my former workplace, bent the knee to Orbán.

When I read about ABC settling a Trump lawsuit of dubious merit—and CBS contemplating the same—it brings to mind the way the courts and the government itself can be used to manipulate and bully media organizations into submission.

Journalists and anyone else who cares about the free press must understand that democratic institutions are more fragile than they look, especially if they face pressure from ruthless and powerful political forces. This is particularly true for the news media, which is also being challenged by the technological revolution in how we communicate information. Just because an outlet has been around for decades and has a storied history does not mean that it will be around forever.

If any good news can be learned from Hungary’s unhappy experience, it is that unless your country turns into a fully authoritarian regime similar to China or Russia, there are still ways for independent journalism to survive. Even in Hungary, some outlets manage to operate independently from the government. Many of them, including the one I run, rely primarily on their audience for support in the form of donations or subscriptions. We learned that it is easy for billionaires and media CEOs to be champions of press freedom when the risks are low, but that you can’t count on them when things get tough. So we rely on our readers instead.

If they feel like what you are doing is valuable, they will be your real allies in confronting the suffocating power of autocracy.

Nigel Farage loves Donald Trump. The 60-year-old’s day job is as the parliamentary representative for the English seaside town of Clacton, and as the leader of Reform, the latest of his populist right-wing parties. But Farage is often focused on America, and his heavily advertised friendship with the 47th president. He was in Washington, D.C., for the inauguration (and chafing that he didn’t get a prime spot in the Capitol Rotunda). He was also onstage last month at the Conservative Political Action Conference, joking to his American audience that “you gave us ‘woke,’ and we gave you Prince Harry.”

As the leader of a party with fewer than half a dozen members of Parliament, Farage knows that his American profile gives him a grandeur he would not otherwise possess. In December, he posed with Elon Musk at Mar-a-Lago under a portrait of a young Trump in cricket whites. Days after Trump survived an assassination attempt in July, Farage flew to the United States on a mission funded by a wealthy Reform donor. On his parliamentary financial-disclosure form, Farage recorded the purpose of his trip as being “to support a friend who was almost killed and to represent Clacton on the world stage.” Lucky Clacton.

But now Farage’s embrace of Trump has become a liability. The 47th president is broadly unpopular in Britain, where Farage hopes to improve the 14.3 percent vote share he received in last year’s election. (He likely needs to at least double that proportion if he wants to be prime minister one day.) Even worse for him, Trump’s MAGA movement is seen as overtly racist and pro-Russia, two huge turnoffs for the majority of British voters. Even Britain’s right-wing newspapers were outraged by Trump’s shabby treatment of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, while Reform’s existing voters are already outliers in their sharply anti-immigration views. Heading further to the right is not a winning strategy in Britain.

Or elsewhere, really. “The populist right around the world has a MAGA problem,” Sunder Katwala, the director of the think tank British Future, told me. “There is a backfire effect in countries that aren’t America.”

[Anne Applebaum: The rise of the brutal American]

Key figures in Trumpworld, such as Musk and Steve Bannon, continually urge European populists to take more extreme positions on race, immigration, and cultural issues. Hard-liners usually point to the success of the German far-right party AfD (known in English as Alternative for Germany), which placed second in the country’s recent elections, its best showing ever. Musk had enthusiastically endorsed the AfD’s leader, Alice Weidel, and he celebrated the result with a personal phone call to her.

In truth, the AfD did not achieve the electoral breakthrough its leaders hoped for. Although conditions were perfect for a populist surge—Germany’s economy is stagnant, and a car attack by an Afghan refugee 10 days before the vote helped keep immigration at the forefront of the national conversation—the AfD struggled to gain a foothold outside the former East Germany. Other parties still refuse to include it in coalition talks. By dabbling in German politics, Trumpworld’s second-most-powerful figure hurt his own business interests while being at best irrelevant to the AfD’s performance. The party “got nothing out of Musk’s backing,” Katwala told me. “It transformed Tesla’s reputation in Germany, but did nothing for the AfD.”

Ultimately, Trump’s fundamental positions have limited appeal to most European electorates. His abandonment of Ukraine is so unpopular in Europe that Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and the French far-right leader Marine Le Pen—two natural MAGA sympathizers—have carefully distanced themselves from it.

As MAGA becomes ever more extreme, allies such as Farage must decide how far to go along with it—in the knowledge that, if they do not oblige, their domestic rivals will. The Reform leader has just fallen out with one of his five MPs, in a drama precipitated by (who else?) Musk, which played out on (where else?) X. Back in January, Trump’s “first buddy” declared his support for the agitator Tommy Robinson, whom Musk credited with publicizing the so-called grooming gangs of men, mostly British citizens of Pakistani descent, who raped and trafficked girls in towns across England. But Farage recognizes Robinson for what he is: a rabble-rouser with numerous criminal convictions. When the Reform leader repeated his long-standing refusal to admit Robinson to his party, Musk declared that Farage “doesn’t have what it takes.”

[Read: Elon has appointed himself king of the world]

Musk’s preferred alternative to lead Reform was Rupert Lowe, a 67-year-old who used to be chairman of a soccer club. Lowe’s day job is representing another English seaside town, Great Yarmouth, in Parliament. But his passion is posting on X. His disclosure forms show that he now makes about $4,000 a month from pumping out spicy takes on Musk’s social network, and all the attention appears to have gone to Lowe’s head. He recently told the Daily Mail that Farage saw himself as a “Messiah” and that Reform risked being a “protest party” unless its leader surrounded himself with good people. By enormous coincidence, soon after the interview was published, Lowe was suspended from Reform for alleged HR violations.

Cast out from Farage’s party, Lowe has since become even more extreme—a known side effect of spending too much time on social media. He wants the families of grooming-gang offenders deported from Britain, not just men convicted of crimes—and perhaps even “entire communities” of British Pakistanis, who he says have ignored the problem. (The white police officers and social workers who might face the same accusation do not appear to bother him.) Lowe claims that his party leader tried to stop him from expressing these views, an assertion that I instinctively believe; Farage, sometimes known as the father of Brexit, has succeeded in disrupting British politics because he knows when a dog whistle is preferable to a whistle. He has repeatedly forced out people from his various parties when their inflammatory rhetoric tipped into overt extremism. In 2018, he left the U.K. Independence Party after it appointed Robinson as an adviser.

Farage has a winning formula, Katwala believes: be guided by the British press. “If the Mail and The Telegraph think the candidate has a racism problem, ditch them,” he said, referring to two right-leaning papers. “If it’s just The Guardian”—which leans left—“you’re fine.” In the U.S., however, any such boundaries have collapsed. The breadth of permitted opinion, Katwala said, “goes all the way out to the Proud Boys”—the far-right group whose leader was jailed for his part in the Capitol insurrection, and then pardoned by Trump.

Voters outside the United States have one more objection to the MAGA movement: Trump and his allies talk about other countries in a profoundly alienating way. “America First”? Fine, but not “America Thinks Your Tin-Pot Country Is a Joke.” The toxic combination of Trump’s pro-Russia leanings, Vice President J. D. Vance’s arrogance and condescension, and Musk’s sad case of advanced poster’s disease have tanked America’s reputation among its traditional allies.

The exultant right-wing influencers who cheer on MAGA’s sassy clapback anti-diplomacy should remember that insulting another country’s politicians is like insulting someone else’s family. I can be rude about my sister, but you can’t. The Trump administration has revived almost every negative stereotype that Europeans have about Americans: too loud, too brash, too big. Vance, who lectures U.S. allies about how to run their affairs, reminds us of every rich guy from suburban Pittsburgh who visits the Amalfi Coast in the summer, drives up the pedestrianized streets, and then complains that the pasta is too chewy and there’s no AC in his 15th-century villa.

As a result, even formerly bloodless technocrats have found new vigor when being picked on by the Trump administration. So far, the net effect of MAGA foreign policy has been to get exactly zero concessions from Moscow, while simultaneously reviving the fortunes of Canada’s Liberal Party and helping the mainstream center-right win in Greenland. The new prime minister of Canada, the former central banker Mark Carney, was able to appeal to voters’ patriotism when rebutting Trump’s demand to annex his country, and his punitive tariffs. “Americans should make no mistake—in trade, as in hockey, Canada will win,” Carney said, after taking over the Liberal leadership from Justin Trudeau. The Liberals have been able to stop their opponent Pierre Poilievre’s momentum by painting him as a MAGA lackey. “A person who worships at the altar of Donald Trump will kneel before him, not stand up to him,” Carney said.  

Friedrich Merz, the leader of Germany’s center-right Christian Democrats, has been similarly energized. During a televised debate ahead of the recent German elections, he attacked the AfD for drawing support from the MAGA movement, painting his rivals as unpatriotic. “The interventions from Washington were no less dramatic and drastic and ultimately outrageous than the interventions we have seen from Moscow,” he added.

Ben Ansell, a University of Oxford politics professor, believes that MAGA’s sympathy for Moscow has given Europe’s mainstream politicians a potent attack line. “We may finally be witnessing the moment of hubris for the past decade’s unstoppable rise of populism,” he wrote in a recent Substack post. When mainstream politicians attack conservative populists, the latter can easily shrug off any criticism as the revenge of elites. “Populists who actually side with an existing foreign enemy, though? Well, that clarifies matters. Now every decision the populist takes can be tied to the foreign enemy.” In recent weeks, Farage’s approval ratings have noticeably fallen.

[Read: How not to hand populists a weapon]

“If you’re being directly attacked by Trump and you have your own elections, it’s hard to imagine being very successful in those elections by saying: Yes, please,” Ansell told me. Farage is plainly struggling to balance his desire to be close to MAGA with his domestic ambitions.

Populist parties define themselves as being against the status quo and the mainstream, but many of their members (and voters) hold eclectic and divergent views on economics and other issues. “These parties are more fragile than people have thought, and now you have this little lever that mainstream parties can use to split them apart—their closeness to much hated figures,” Ansell told me. European voters have long been wary of Moscow’s intentions. What’s new is a sense that the people now running the United States have lined up with Russia—and against Europe. “Vladimir Putin has been around for a quarter of a century,” Ansell said. “It’s Musk and Trump.”

Populists outside America might love the reflected glow of MAGA’s power and success, but being linked to the Trump administration means tethering themselves, in the eyes of their home audiences, to an unpopular president, his unpopular celebrity adviser, his unpopular stance on Ukraine, and his unpopular bullying tactics. That is populists’ MAGA problem—and the mainstream’s opportunity to fight back.

In January, when the historian Avi Shilon returned to Columbia University from winter break, a thought coursed through his mind: If calm can take hold in Gaza, then perhaps it could also happen in Morningside Heights. Just a few days earlier, in time for the start of the semester, Hamas and Israel had brokered a cease-fire in their war.

Over the many months of that war, Columbia was the site of some of America’s most vitriolic protests against Israel’s actions, and even its existence. For two weeks last spring, an encampment erected by anti-Israel demonstrators swallowed the fields in the center of the compact Manhattan campus. Nobody could enter Butler Library without hearing slogans such as “Globalize the intifada!” and “We don’t want no Zionists here!” and “Burn Tel Aviv to the ground!” At the end of April, students, joined by sympathizers from outside the university gates, stormed Hamilton Hall—which houses the undergraduate-college deans’ offices—and then battled police when they sought to clear the building. Because of the threat of spiraling chaos, the university canceled its main commencement ceremony in May.

Shilon felt that the tamping of hostilities in Gaza made the moment ripe for the course he was scheduled to teach, “History of Modern Israel,” which would examine the competing Jewish and Palestinian narratives about his native country’s founding.

But Columbia soon disabused him of his hopes. About 30 minutes into the first session of his seminar, four people, their faces shrouded in keffiyehs, burst into his classroom. A protester circled the seminar table, flinging flyers in front of Shilon’s students. One flyer bore an image of a boot stomping on a Star of David; another stated, The Enemy Will Not See Tomorrow.

In the Israeli universities where Shilon had studied and taught, he was accustomed to strident critiques of the country. Sometimes he even found himself sympathizing with them. Taking up difficult arguments struck him as the way to navigate tense disagreements, so he rose from his chair and gingerly approached the protesters. “You’re invited to learn,” he told them.

But the protesters ignored him. As one held up a camera to film, another stared at it and delivered a monologue in which she described Shilon’s class—which had barely progressed beyond a discussion of expectations for the semester—as an example of “Columbia University’s normalization of genocide.”

After she finished her speech, the demonstrators left the room, but a sense of intrusion lingered. Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the umbrella group that organized protests on campus, posted a video of the action, with the caption: “We disrupted a zionist class, and you should too.” The university later offered to provide security for Shilon’s class because it couldn’t be sure if CUAD was bluffing.

Over the past two years, Columbia’s institutional life has become more and more absurd. Confronted with a war on the other side of the world, the course of which the university has zero capacity to affect, a broad swath of the community acted as if the school’s trustees and administrators could determine the fate of innocent families in Gaza. To force the university into acceding to demands—ending study abroad in Israel, severing a partnership with Tel Aviv University, divesting from companies with holdings in Israel––protesters attempted to shut down campus activity. For the sake of entirely symbolic victories, they were willing to risk their academic careers and even arrest.

Because the protesters treated the war as a local issue, they trained their anger on Jewish and Israeli students and faculty, including Shilon, some of whom have been accused of complicity with genocide on the basis of their religious affiliation or national origin. More than any other American university, Columbia experienced a breakdown in the fabric of its community that demanded a firm response from administrators—but these administrators tended to choke on their own fears.

Many of the protesters followed university rules governing demonstrations and free expression. Many others did not. Liberal administrators couldn’t or wouldn’t curb the illiberalism in their midst. By failing to discipline protesters who transgressed university rules, they signaled that disrupting classrooms carried no price. By tolerating professors who bullied students who disagreed with them, they signaled that incivility and even harassment were acceptable forms of discourse.

It was as if Columbia was reliving the bedlam of 1968, which included a student takeover of the university and scarred the institution for decades. And just like in the Vietnam era, the university became a ripe target for demagogues on the right, who are eager to demolish the prestige of elite higher education. And now that Donald Trump and his allies control the federal government, they have used anti-Semitism as a pretext for damaging an institution that they abhor. In the name of rescuing the Jews of Columbia, the Trump administration cut off $400 million in federal contracts and grants to the university. Trump officials then sent a letter demanding—as preconditions for restoring the funds—a series of immediate, far-reaching steps, including suspending and expelling Hamilton Hall protesters, producing a plan to overhaul admissions, and putting the school’s Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies under “academic receivership.”

Mark Rudd, president of Students for a Democratic Society, addresses students at Columbia University in May 1968. (Hulton Archive / Getty)

And in an attempt to suppress political views it dislikes, the administration authorized the unlawful detention of Mahmoud Khalil, an alumnus who helped organize campus protests, and sent federal agents to search two dorm rooms. Another graduate student, targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, fled to Canada rather than risk apprehension. The Trump administration’s war on Columbia stands to wreck research, further inflame tensions on campus, and destroy careers—including, in a supreme irony, those of many Jewish academics, scientists, physicians, and graduate students whom the administration ostensibly wants to protect.

Trump’s autocratic presence unbalances every debate. But just because his administration is exploiting the issue of anti-Semitism does not mean that anti-Jewish activism is not an issue at Columbia. Somewhere along the way, one of the nation’s greatest universities lost its capacity to conduct intellectual arguments over contentious issues without resorting to hyperbole and accusations of moral deficiency.

On Israel, the issue that most sharply divides Columbia, such accusations took a sinister cast. Jewish students faced ostracism and bullying that, if experienced by any other group of students  on campus, would be universally regarded as unacceptable. It was a crisis that became painfully evident in the course of the war over Gaza, but it didn’t begin with the war, and it won’t end with it.

The story of American Jewry can be told, in part, by the history of Columbia’s admissions policy. At the turn of the 20th century, when entry required merely passing an exam, the sons of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe began rushing into the institution. By 1920, Columbia was likely 40 percent Jewish. This posed a marketing problem for the school, as the children of New York’s old knickerbocker elite began searching out corners of the Ivy League with fewer Brooklyn accents.

To restore Anglo-Saxon Protestant demographic dominance, university president Nicholas Murray Butler invented the modern college-application process, in which concepts such as geographic diversity and a well-rounded student body became pretexts to weed out studious Jews from New York City. In 1921, Columbia became the first private college to impose a quota limiting the number of Jews. (In the ’30s, Columbia rejected Richard Feynman, who later won a Nobel Prize in physics, and Isaac Asimov, the great science fiction writer.) Columbia, however, was intent on making money off the Jews it turned away, so to educate them, it created Seth Low Junior College in Brooklyn, a second-rate version of the Manhattan institution.

Only after World War II, when America fought a war against Nazism, did this exclusionary system wither away. When I attended Columbia for four blissful years, a generation or so ago, the school was a Jewish wonderland, where I first encountered the pluralism of American Jewish life. I became friends with red-diaper babies, kids raised in Jewish socialist families. I dated an Orthodox woman who had converted from evangelical Christianity. Several floors of my dorm had been nicknamed Anatevka, after the shtetl in Fiddler on the Roof; they had kosher kitchens, and on the Sabbath, the elevators would automatically stop on each of those floors. I studied Yiddish with a doyenne of the dying Yiddish theater and attended lectures with Yosef Yerushalmi, one of the great Jewish historians of his generation. At Columbia, for the first time in my life, I felt completely at home in my identity.

I also imbibed the university’s protest culture: I briefly helped take over Hamilton Hall in the name of preserving the Audubon Ballroom, the Upper Manhattan site of Malcolm X’s assassination. Columbia wanted to convert the building into a research center. The leader of our movement, Benjamin Jealous, who went on to head the NAACP, was suspended for his role; I was put on probation.

Nostalgia, however, is a distorting filter. Long before the October 7 attack by Hamas on southern Israel that sparked the subsequent invasion of Gaza, there were accusations of anti-Semitism on campus. I tended to wish them away, but after the Hamas attack, the evidence kept walloping me.

Although protests against Israel erupted on many campuses after October 7, the collision between Zionists and anti-Zionists was especially virulent at Columbia. Less than a week after the attack, a woman was arrested in front of the library for allegedly beating an Israeli student who was hanging posters of hostages held in Gaza. (The Manhattan district attorney found that the woman hadn’t intentionally hit the student and dismissed the case after she apologized and agreed to counseling.)

Soon after the war in Gaza began, the Columbia Daily Spectator interviewed more than 50 Jewish students about their experiences: 13 told the student newspaper that they had been attacked or harassed; 12 admitted that they had obscured markers of their Jewish identity, tucking away Star of David necklaces and hiding kippot under caps to avoid provoking the ire of fellow students.

To Columbia’s misfortune, the university had a new president, Minouche Shafik, who’d arrived by way of the London School of Economics. Any leader would have been overwhelmed by the explosion of passions, but she seemed especially shell-shocked by the rancor—and how it attracted media, activists, and politicians, all exploiting the controversy for their own purposes. Panicked leaders, without any clear sense of their own direction, have a rote response: They appoint a task force. And in November 2023, Shafik appointed some of Columbia’s most eminent academics to assess the school’s anti-Semitism problem. (Shafik had hoped to have a parallel task force on Islamophobia, but Rashid Khalidi, a Columbia historian and the most prominent Palestinian scholar in the country, called the idea a “fig leaf to pretend that they are ‘balanced,’” and the idea never hatched.)

In “listening sessions” with students, task-force members heard one recurring complaint: that administrators were strangely indifferent to Jewish students complaining about abuse. Rather than investigating incidents, some administrators steered Jewish students to mental-health counseling, as if they needed therapy to toughen them up. Students who had filed official reports of bias with the university claimed that they’d never heard back. (To protect the privacy of listening-session participants, the task force never confirmed specific instances, but it deemed the complaints credible.)

Perhaps, early on, one could imagine benign explanations for the weak response. But in June, as the task force went about its investigation, The Washington Free Beacon reported on a series of text messages fired off by four Columbia deans as they attended a panel on Jewish life at Columbia. (A panel attendee who had sat behind one of the administrators had surreptitiously photographed the text thread over her shoulder.) Instead of sympathetically listening to panelists discuss anti-Semitism, the deans unwittingly confirmed the depth of the problem. These officials, whose role gave them responsibility for student safety, snarkily circulated accusations about the pernicious influence of Jewish power. “Amazing what $$$ can do,” one of the deans wrote. Another accused the head of campus Hillel of playing up complaints for the sake of fundraising. “Comes from such a place of privilege,” one of them moaned. After the Free Beacon published the screenshots, Columbia suspended three of the administrators. Not long after, they resigned.

A month later, at the beginning of the academic year, the task force published a damning depiction of quotidian student life. An especially powerful section of the report described the influence of Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the organizer of the anti-Israel protests. CUAD was a coalition of 116 tuition-supported, faculty-advised student groups, including the university mariachi band and the Barnard Garden Club.

CUAD doesn’t simply oppose war and occupation; it endorses violence as the pathway to its definition of liberation. A year ago, a Columbia student activist told an audience watching him on Instagram, “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.” At first, CUAD dissociated itself from the student. But then the group reconsidered and apologized for its momentary lapse of stridency. “Violence is the only path forward,” CUAD said in an official statement. That wasn’t a surprising admission; its public statements regularly celebrate martyrdom.

When groups endorsed CUAD, they forced Jewish students to confront a painful choice. To participate in beloved activities, they needed to look past the club’s official membership in an organization that endorsed the killing of Jews and the destruction of the world’s only Jewish-majority country.

According to the task force, complaining about the alliance with CUAD or professing sympathy for Israel could lead to a student being purged from an extracurricular activity. When a member of the dance team questioned the wisdom of supporting CUAD, she was removed from the organization’s group chats and effectively kicked off the team. A co-president of Sewa, a Sikh student group, says that she was removed from her post because of her alleged Zionism. In an invitation to a film screening, the founder of an LGBTQ group, the LezLions, wrote, “Zionists aren’t invited.”

I’m not suggesting that Jews at Columbia feel constantly under siege. When I gave a speech at the campus Hillel group last spring, many members, even some who are passionate supporters of Israel, told me that they are happy at Columbia and have never personally experienced anything resembling anti-Semitism. The pro-Palestinian encampments included Jewish protesters, some of whom received abuse from their fellow Jews. To the task force’s credit, its report acknowledges many such complexities, but it brimmed with accounts of disturbing incidents worthy of a meaningful official response. Unfortunately, that’s not the Columbia way.

Had I been wiser as an undergrad, I could have squinted and seen the roots of the current crisis. In the 1990s, Israel was a nonissue on campus: The Oslo peace process was in high gear, and a two-state solution and coexistence were dreams within reach. But the most imposing academic celebrity on campus was the Jerusalem-born Edward Said, a brilliant professor of literature, who had served as a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s legislative arm.

During my years at Columbia, Said, who was battling cancer, was a remote figure. A dandy who loved his tweeds and was immersed in the European cosmopolitanism that he critiqued, he taught only a course on Giuseppe Verdi and imperialism.

Still, he bestrode the university. His masterwork, Orientalism, was one of the few books by an active Columbia professor regularly included in the college’s core curriculum. That book, by the university’s most acclaimed professor, was also a gauntlet thrown in the community’s face. Said had convincingly illustrated how racism infected the production of knowledge in Middle Eastern studies. Even if scholarship paraded as the disinterested study of foreign cultures, it was inherently political, too often infected by a colonialist mindset.

To correct for that bias, admirers of Said’s book concluded, universities needed to hire a different style of academic, including scholars with roots in the region they studied, not just a bunch of white guys fascinated by Arabs. The Middle Eastern–studies department filled with Said protégés, who lacked his charm but taught with ferocious passion. Because they were unabashed activists, these new scholars had no compunction about, say, canceling class so that students could attend pro-Palestinian rallies.

Joseph Massad, a Jordanian-born political scientist who wrote a history of nationalism in his native country, became the most notorious of the new coterie soon after arriving in 1999. His incendiary comments provoked his ideological foes to respond with fury and, sometimes, to unfairly twist his quotes in the course of their diatribes. But his actual record was clear enough. Writing in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram in 2003, he accused the Israelis of being the true anti-Semites, because they destroyed the culture of the Jewish diaspora; the Palestinians were the real Jews, he argued, because they were being massacred.

Violence, when directed at Jews, never seemed to bother him. This moral vacuity was on full display in the column he wrote in response to October 7, which he called a “resistance offensive,” for The Electronic Intifada, a Chicago-based publication aligned with the more radical wing of the Palestinian cause. His essay used a series of euphoric adjectives—“astonishing,” “astounding,” “awesome”—to describe Hamas’s invasion, without ever condemning, let alone mentioning, the gruesome human toll of the massacre, which included rape and the kidnapping of babies. In fact, he coldly described the towns destroyed by Hamas as “settler-colonies.”

Massad has long been accused of carrying that polemical style into the classroom. In the course description for a class called “Palestinian and Israeli Politics and Societies,” he wrote in 2002: “The purpose of the course is not to provide a ‘balanced’ coverage of the views of both sides.” On the one hand, that’s an admirable admission. On the other hand, Jewish students complained that he treated those with dissenting opinions as if they were moral reprobates, unworthy of civility.

In 2004, a pro-Israel group in Boston put together a low-budget documentary called Columbia Unbecoming, which strung together student testimony about the pedagogical style of Columbia’s Middle Eastern–studies program. To take two representative incidents: After an Israeli student asked Massad a question at an extracurricular event, the professor demanded to know how many Palestinians he had killed; a woman recounted how another professor, George Saliba, had told her not to opine on Israel-Palestine questions because her green eyes showed that she couldn’t be a “Semite.”

In response, Massad denied ever meeting the Israeli student; Saliba wrote that he didn’t recall the green-eyes comments and that the student might have misconstrued what he was saying. But Columbia’s then-president, Lee Bollinger, instantly recognized the problem and appointed his own task force to examine the complaints. But it would have taken more than a task force to address the underlying problem. The emerging style of the American academy, especially prevalent at Columbia, viewed activism flowing from moral absolutes as integral to the mission of the professoriat. But a style that prevailed in African American–studies and gender-studies departments was incendiary when applied to Israel. With race and gender, there was largely a consensus on campus, but Israel divided the university community. And as much as Bollinger professed to value dissenting opinions, his university was ill-equipped to accommodate two conflicting points of view. And the gap between those two points of view kept growing, as Said’s legacy began to seep into even the far reaches of Columbia.

If I were writing a satiric campus novel about Columbia, I would have abandoned the project on January 29. That’s the day the Spectator published lab notes for an introductory astronomy course, written by a teaching assistant, that instructed students: “As we watch genocide unfold in Gaza, it is also important to tell the story of Palestinians outside of being the subjects of a military occupation. Take 15 minutes or so to read through the articles ‘Wonder and the Life of Palestinian Astronomy’ and ‘In Gaza, Scanning the Sky for Stars, Not Drones.’ Remind yourself that our dreams, our wonders, our aspirations … are not any more worthy.” At Columbia, a student couldn’t contemplate the Big Dipper without being forced to consider the fate of Khan Yunis.

This was a minor scandal, but a representative one. Over the years, the subject of Israel became nearly inescapable at Columbia, even in disciplines seemingly far removed from Gaza. For a swath of graduate students and professors, Palestinian liberation—and a corollary belief that Israel is uniquely evil among nations—became something close to civic religion.

In 2023, at the School of Public Health, a professor who taught a section of its core curriculum to more than 400 students denounced Jewish donors to the university as “wealthy white capitalists” who laundered “blood money” through the school. He hosted a panel on the “settler-colonial determinants of health” that described “Israel-Palestine” as a primary example of a place where the “right to health” can never be realized. Several years ago, the Graduate School of Architecture, Preservation and Planning offered a class on “Architecture and Settler Colonialism” and hosted an event titled “Architecture Against Apartheid.”

By insisting that Israel is the great moral catastrophe of our age, professors and graduate students transmitted their passions to their classes. So it is not surprising that Jewish students with sympathy for Israel found themselves subject to social opprobrium not just from their teachers, but also from their peers. In its September report, the task force that Shafik had convened described the problem starkly: “We heard about students being avoided and avoiding others” and about “isolation and even intimidation in classrooms, bullying, threats, stereotypes, ethnic slurs, disqualification from opportunities, fear of retaliation and community erosion.” This was the assessment of Columbia professors, many of them unabashed liberals, who risked alienating colleagues by describing the situation bluntly.

Pro-Palestinian protesters march around Columbia in April 2024. (Michael M. Santiago / Getty)

In September, the task force presented its findings to Columbia’s University Senate, an elected deliberative body that brings faculty, administrators, and students into the governance of the institution. Its creation was a utopian response to the 1968 protests. But the senate session about anti-Semitism was a fiasco. Almost from the start, members began to attack the task-force report’s motives and methodology—even its focus on discrimination against Jews. “No such resources were put into covering anybody else’s subjective experience on this campus,” the English professor Joseph Slaughter said, “and I think that creates real problems for the community.” The hostility to the report wasn’t meaningless fulmination; it was evidence of how a large part of the faculty was determined to prevent the university from acknowledging the presence of anti-Jewish activity in the school.

No other university has a governance structure quite like Columbia’s, and for good reason. Most academics with busy lives want to avoid endless meetings with their colleagues, so most professors aren’t rushing to join the senate. In recent years, the senate has attracted those of an activist bent, who are willing to put up with tedium in service of a higher cause. Two members of the rules committee were allegedly part of a faculty contingent that stood guard around the encampments on the quad. They did so even though they had jurisdiction over potentially disciplining those protesters. As it happens, exceedingly few of the protesters who flagrantly disregarded university rules have suffered any consequences for their actions. Columbia didn’t impose discipline on students who stormed Hamilton Hall last spring—at least not until last week, amid Trump’s threat of drastic cuts to the university. But by then, a culture of impunity was firmly rooted.

Barnard College is integrated into Columbia, but it has its own set of rules, its own governance structure and disciplinary procedures. And it acted swiftly to expel two of the students who were in the group that burst into Avi Shilon’s class in January. (Columbia had suspended another participant, pending an investigation, and failed to identify the other.) For once, it felt as if the university was upholding its basic covenant with its students: to protect the sanctity of the classroom.

But instead of changing anyone’s incentives, Barnard’s hard-line punishment inspired protesters to rush Millbank Hall, banging drums and chanting, “There is only one solution, intifada revolution.” In the course of storming the building, they allegedly assaulted a Barnard employee, sending him to the hospital. For more than six hours, they shut down the building, which houses the offices of the administration, and left only after the college threatened to bring in the police and offered an official meeting with the protesters. But the possibility of police action wasn’t a sufficient deterrent, because a week later, two dozen protesters returned to occupy Barnard’s library.

In some deep sense, the university had lost the capacity to reassert control, let alone confront the root causes of the chaos. And looking back over the past few months, I see a pattern of events that, in some ways, is far more troubling than the encampments that received so many headlines. In November, protesters descended on the building that houses Hillel, the center of Jewish life on campus—its main purpose is to provide Jewish students with religious services and kosher food—and demanded that the university sever ties with the organization. The next month, a demonstrator marching up Broadway punched a kippah-wearing Jew in the face. In January, to memorialize the murder of a Palestinian girl, protesters filled the toilets of the School of International and Public Affairs with cement. Skewering two Jewish women affiliated with the school—its dean, Keren Yarhi-Milo, and an adjunct assistant professor at the school, Rebecca Weiner—they spray-painted the message “Keren eat Weiner,” with an image of feces.

All of this unfolded as the Trump administration launched an assault on higher education. But thus far, Columbia students haven’t bothered to protest that. Unlike Palestine, which for most students is a distant cause, the stripping of federal funding for the institution will ripple through the lives of students and faculty. But university activism has its sights obsessively locked on Israel.

That Trump assault on Columbia has now arrived, in the heaviest-handed form. Anti-Semitism on campus, a problem that merits a serious response, has been abused in the course of Trump’s quest to remake America in his image. Tellingly, the administration’s withholding of federal grants will fall hardest on the hard sciences, which are the part of the university most immune to anti-Semitism, and hardly touch the humanities, where overwrought criticisms of Israel flourish.

The indiscriminate, punitive nature of Trump’s meddling may unbalance Columbia even further. A dangerous new narrative has emerged there and on other campuses: that the new federal threats result from “fabricated charges of antisemitism,” as CUAD recently put it, casting victims of harassment as the cunning villains of the story. In this atmosphere, Columbia seems unlikely to reckon with the deeper causes of anti-Jewish abuse on its campus. But in its past—especially in its history of overcoming its discriminatory treatment of Jews—the institution has revealed itself capable of overcoming its biases, conscious and otherwise, against an excluded group. It has shown that it can stare hard at itself, channel its highest values, and find its way to a better course.

The Founders knew that Americans, for better or worse, had an insatiable desire for overseas trade. “They are as aquatic as the tortoises and sea-fowl,” observed John Adams, “and the love of commerce, with its conveniences and pleasures, is a habit in them as unalterable as their natures.” As early as 1785 he foresaw that Americans would be compelled to form “connections with Europe, Asia, and Africa,” and he advised that “the sooner we form those connections into a judicious system, the better it will be for us and our children.” Thomas Jefferson would have preferred to cease all commerce with the rest of the world and rely on the simple virtues of the “yeoman farmer,” but he knew this was impossible. “Our people have a decided taste for navigation and commerce … and their servants are in duty bound to calculate all their measures on this datum.” Even that much-caricatured “Jacksonian,” Andrew Jackson himself, as president never fired a shot in anger but negotiated more trade agreements with foreign powers than any of his predecessors.

The American love of trade made using the practice as a weapon against other nations difficult. When Jefferson forgot his own lesson and tried to embargo trade with Great Britain in 1807 in response to the British navy’s abuse of American merchants on the high seas, his efforts backfired, stirring talk of secession in the New England states that conducted most of that trade. It turned out to be easier to get Americans to support a shooting war with Great Britain than a trade war.

Donald Trump is now learning the hard way how vulnerable America is when it comes to trade wars. This is not because the United States doesn’t in theory hold the strongest hand. The American market is the most desired in the world, and any restriction on access to that market should hurt other countries more than it hurts the United States. The ratio of international trade to GDP for the U.S. is roughly 25 percent, compared with more than 60 percent on average for all other nations. In Germany, foreign trade tallies up to 90 percent of GDP. That ought to make the country vulnerable and give the United States leverage. In practice, however, Americans have proved time and again that they have a very low threshold of pain when it comes to trade wars. Jefferson was not wrong to believe that Britain depended heavily on American trade when he launched his embargo in 1807; what he did not anticipate was that his own citizens would cave before Britain did.

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The problem is, or at least has been up until now, democracy, and, more specifically, electoral politics in a federal system where narrow, local interests can have broad national political impact. A trade dispute might harm only one sector of the economy, but if that sector happens to coincide with a crucial voting bloc, it can put the United States at a disadvantage in a contest with a nominally weaker power.

A good example of this came during World War I, before the United States had entered the war and Woodrow Wilson was trying to navigate his way through British blockades and German submarine attacks on transatlantic shipping while desperately trying to preserve American neutrality. The United States was far less reliant on international trade then; it was only 11 percent of GDP. But as Wilson learned, even damage to particular sectors of the economy could threaten political upheaval. Although his personal inclinations were pro-British, for instance, London’s threats to blockade cotton as contraband of war infuriated the Democrats’ key southern constituency. Wilson’s secretary of the Treasury, William Gibbs McAdoo, recalled spending “more sleepless nights thinking about cotton” than about anything else during his time in office. The rest of his sleepless nights were spent worrying about finding markets for midwestern grain, much of which had been purchased by Germany and other European nations prior to the war. These specific sectors, because they involved states and regions essential to national political coalitions, had influence on American decision making that exceeded their overall importance to the American economy.  

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Trump must believe, as Jefferson did, that the world needs America more than America needs the world, and he may be right—in theory. The problem is that individual voting blocs mean more to him than carrying out a consistent trade war, as he has repeatedly demonstrated during both terms in office. In his first term, the damage done to farmers by his tariffs on imports was sufficiently threatening politically that he had to spend much of the money gained by the tariffs to compensate the farmers for their losses. His vacillations and emendations in his latest rounds of tariffs this year have been similarly motivated by his desire not to alienate Republican voters in particular states—northern-tier states that rely heavily on trade with Canada and automaking states that stand to lose badly from tariffs on auto parts, steel, and aluminum crossing the Mexican and Canadian borders. It is no accident that among the Europeans’ first retaliatory tariffs have been those against Harley-Davidson and American whiskey. Other nations may know their history better than Trump does and have figured out that tariffing sectors of the economy that hit Trump voters can have an impact beyond their dollar value. The United States is a nation split down the middle politically, so marginal voting groups can have a huge effect. This significantly vitiates the American advantage.

It would be one thing if Trump’s supporters were willing to suffer economic hardship in order to show their support for the MAGA way. As Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama put it, “There’s going to be some pain with tariffs,” but “no pain, no gain.” The problem for Trump is that, so far, as in the past, even his own voters don’t have much tolerance for pain.