The protesters disrupting college campuses across the country are the schools’ Marxist chickens coming home to roost.

For decades, U.S. universities, especially selective ones, have favored applicants who struck the right “social justice” notes, and hired faculty that reinforced those views. Then they cemented this zeitgeist with the jargon of identity and the “oppressed-oppressor” paradigm.

What did Columbia, Harvard, New York, Yale, MIT, Princeton, and the many other universities now being rocked by pro-Palestinian protests expect? That there would not be consequences?

These will be felt most deeply, and most unfortunately, by the students. The 2024 class, which didn’t have high school graduations because of the COVID mess, may now see their college ones canceled, or at least severely disrupted, because some of their classmates have been taught to oppose Israel’s right to exist or simply believe this is the right social pose to adopt.

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Most affected by this mess are the Jewish students, who, in the year of our Lord 2024, and in America, no less, now have legitimate fears about being on campus. We have reached the point when, at Columbia, Rabbi Elie Buechler advised Jewish students to return home and stay there because “Columbia University’s Public Safety and the NYPD cannot guarantee Jewish students’ safety.”

That American Jews have gotten caught up in the maelstrom should also not surprise anyone. Israelis are described by the Left as the “oppressor” in the Middle East narrative.

It apparently does not matter that on Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists invaded the Jewish state and massacred 1,200 people, mostly civilians, many women and children—the worst atrocity committed against Jews since the Holocaust. A narrative that boils everything down to an epic struggle between the oppressor and those he oppresses gives simple minds license to justify any cruelty.

Most of the version of Marxism that provides the beliefs now rife on U.S. campuses has evolved from the economically determinist ideology first set down by Karl Marx and his co-writer Friedrich Engels in the 1848 Communist Manifesto.

Katharine Cornell Gorka and I have titled our new book NextGen Marxism because the original economic orthodoxy has gone first through a cultural distillation in Europe, and then yet another here in America, with other features, such as race, sex, and climate, being added.

But the “oppressor-oppressed” paradigm is undistilled Marxism. Among the opening words of the Manifesto, Marx and Engels write:

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another…” (emphasis added).

Marxists of all stripes, economic ones, cultural ones, and NextGen ones, have dressed up this struggle in the language of “social justice.” This struggle is supposedly carried out to help the downtrodden against those who keep them down, and seeks, as the Manifesto puts it, “a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large.”

But “social justice” must be put inside scare quotes, as I do in this article, because what the revolutionaries want most is this “reconstitution” of society, not an improvement in social conditions. Many Marxists end up recognizing that capitalism improves the lives of all.

For example, Max Horkheimer, the German architect of the culturally Marxist “critical theory” approach, averred in 1969 that Marx had erred in believing that “capitalist society would necessarily be overcome by the solidarity of the workers due to their increasing impoverishment. This idea is false. The society in which we live doesn’t impoverish workers but helps them toward a better life.”

In the United States, NextGen Marxists have, for this reason, foregone the worker as the revolutionary figure and have transferred that task to members of racial and sexual “marginalized” groups, which they insist are the oppressed, and thus have a reason to seek the “revolutionary reconstitution of society at large.”

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The various Black Lives Matter organizations are Exhibit A of this phenomenon. They are deeply steeped in the American descendant of critical theory, known as critical race theory, and portray themselves as a social movement working to help racial and sexual minorities against the oppressor’s ideology of “white supremacy.”

But all the architects of BLM are self-described Marxists who openly say they seek societal reconstitution. Melina Abdullah, the head of the group BLM Grassroots, is perhaps the most powerful BLM leader at the moment. Her 2003 dissertation at the University of Southern California draws heavily from the top CRT thinkers.

She is also a sworn enemy of the capitalist system that, as Horkheimer recognized, actually improves the lives of the poor.

“When we feed capitalism, we feed racism,” Abdullah said in a 2020 interview on the podcast People’s Party With Talib Kweli. Abdullah has also said that “white capitalism feeds itself through the exploitation of Africa and black people.”

Abdullah is a tenured professor at California State University because these are the types of “academics” that universities hire, just as Stanford University admitted a student who, for his admissions essay, wrote the words #BlackLivesMatter over and over again.

It is no surprise that BLM is deeply committed to the Palestinian cause and sees Israel as an oppressor. Universities have invited in this poison, and in 2024, we are seeing the awful consequences. Maybe let’s cut off the taxpayer spigot until they cleanse themselves.