Despite overheated rhetoric about America’s imminent descent into fascism, despite the frequent labeling of President Trump’s advisers and supporters as “Nazis,” and despite the anti-Trump left’s habit of calling itself the “resistance,” neo-Nazis and white supremacists are few and far between in the U.S. James Kirchick tries to make sense of the current hysteria:

[W]here do all these legions of Nazis and passionate brigades of anti-Nazis come from? . . . They are the products of a moral panic with an underlying political cause, which is now being exploited by a wide range of political operatives. . . . Fighting Nazis is a free and easy moral victory because there is almost no one on the other side. This suggests that [those who] advertise themselves . . . as brave and forthright fighters of Nazis are either immature or deploying lazy rhetoric to get their listeners to join in the unwitting pursuit of some other, presumably much less popular or acceptable, goal. . . .

The use of Nazis as a political strawman was long a propaganda technique of the Soviet Union, which casually slapped the label “fascist” on anyone or anything it didn’t like. (The tradition continues with today’s Kremlin propagandists, for whom “fascist” or “Nazi” is interchangeable with “critic of Russian foreign policy.”) In the American context, hyping the threat of Nazism is a proven fundraising tool. . . .

Besides the obvious dangers, and inherent foolishness, of such thinking, Kirchick notes that it can also have particularly deleterious consequences for Jews:

[W]hile anti-Jewish social prejudice, like saying the words “smelly kike,” for example, or refusing Jews admittance to your country club, has become a serious social crime—the sort of transgression that can destroy careers—actual anti-Semitism (“a cabal of rich Jews secretly manipulates and controls American foreign policy to benefit Israel,” “Israel is an illegitimate foreign colonial implant whose bloodthirsty leadership hates peace and delights in killing Palestinian children”) has become increasingly acceptable, even mainstream in some parts of the left.

Standing up to Nazism, as members of the Democratic Socialists of America valiantly did in Charlottesville, serves as a convenient fig leaf behind which to hide institutionalized organizational anti-Semitism, which the group giddily expressed just a week prior at their annual convention in Chicago, chanting “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free,” after passing a motion in support of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel. . . .

Social prejudice may be annoying, depressing, and generally unpleasant, but it’s anti-Semitism that has proved to be physically dangerous—and very often lethal—to Jews.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.