Last week, Donald Trump hosted the rapper Kanye West—who recently made headlines with a series of anti-Semitic outbursts—for dinner at his Mar-a-Lago home. Also present was Nick Fuentes, a far-right provocateur, anti-Semite, and Holocaust denier. The former president has since sought to distance himself from Fuentes, and claims he was not aware beforehand that West planned to bring him as a guest. Jay Nordlinger comments on the incident:

When an ex-president sups with anti-Semites, and notorious ones, does it aid the normalization of anti-Semitism? I think it does. What presidents do matters, and what ex-presidents do matters. They are leaders. They are in the public eye. They set tones, for better or worse.

Following the dinner, Trump got a lot of criticism, true. But I caution: there is always a lot of criticism en route to normalization.

Earlier this year, two congressmen spoke at Fuentes’s America First Political Action Conference: Marjorie Taylor Greene, of Georgia, and Paul Gosar, of Arizona. Both are Republicans. Greene, I wrote, “was the star speaker.” And “the number-two star, probably, was” the organizer himself: Fuentes.

It is possible to make too much of anti-Semitism (and too much of racism and other evil things). It is possible to make too little of it. You don’t need to be looking for anti-Semites under every bed. Then again, many are jumping up and down on the bed. If I had to err, I would err on the side of making too much of anti-Semitism. An excess of vigilance is not a bad thing. The record of anti-Semitism is catastrophic.

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.